The amazing work of Lucerne Festival‘s Academy, focused on contemporary music, was on full display at Saturday morning’s concert featuring the incomparable Claire Chase, who joined members of the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) led by Vimbayi Kaziboni for the first Swiss performance of Chaya Czernowin‘s ‘The Divine Thawing of the Core’, which she premiered last month.
Czernowin’s gripping response to the political turmoil of the last several years in her native Israel, which she metaphorically imagines as ‘the forced thawing of a democratic society into a theocracy’ – hence the ironic title – ‘Divine Thawing’ is a substantial, 53-minute work for contrabass flute and an ensemble of six flutes, six oboes, six trumpets, trombone, tuba, percussion, piano, and three cellos. More than expressing pain, Czernowin’s astonishing score enacts it, with a devastating, claustrophobic sense of helplessness that presses on you like a physical weight. Rarely have triads sounded so terrifying.
‘It is a very elemental, naked and maybe an intimate beginning,’ remarks the composer, ‘which is forced to melt away through irony into an elemental brutality, in an uneven process, which includes a demonic waltz, in a gradual thawing of its features into a kind of a wholly different way of expression which is more coherent, ceremonial and brutally primitive.’
Chase’s contrabass flute anchored ‘Divine Thawing’ with an uncanny blend of ferocity and vulnerability. With her intense breaths woven into the texture, she seemed to live every extreme of Czernowin’s score, conveying its sense of struggle and resistance and raw endurance. A stunning performance.
Czernowin’s work also reflects her deep admiration of Galina Ustvolskaya‘s Symphony No. 2 from 1979 (‘True and Eternal Bliss!’), which was performed immediately preceding ‘Divine Thawing’, with Stefan Jovanovic as the reciter. The incredible originality of this music made a tremendous impact, uncompromisingly fierce, under Kaziboni’s guidance. The LFCO musicians are truly fearless.
Opening the program were the stark sonorities of Sofia Gubaidulina’s Trio for Three Trumpets from 1976, which summoned the audience into the unfamiliar terrain of the rest of the concert with a magnetic incantation.
Big news this week: just after Esa-Pekka Salonen wrapped up his Lucerne Festival visit with the Orchestre de Paris, it was announced that he has been named the ensemble’s Chief Conductor starting in 2027. Parallel to that, he’ll become the take up the new Creativity and Innovation Chair of the Philharmonie de Paris. Salonen’s collaboration with the orchestra in Lucerne offered a vivid taste of that future partnership in two very different programs last weekend.
In the first, Augustin Hadelich was the soloist in an account of the Brahms concerto notable for its shadowed lyricism and spacious pacing, illuminating the score’s darker hues. Hadelich played his own cadenza and his arrangement of a Carlos Gardel tango as a steam-vent of an encore following such intensity. If Salonen brought structural clarity to the Brahms, the suite from Prokofiev’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ that followed surged with dramatic sweep. The episodes seemed to unfold as part of an inexorable tragic arc rather than a set of contrasting miniatures.
His second evening with the Paris musicians revealed a touch more humor alongside the testosterone of ‘Don Juan’. But all that Straussian horn-iness set the stage for the much-anticipated world premiere of Salonen’s own Horn Concerto written for Berliner Philharmoniker principal Stefan Dohr. It’s a big piece, heroic in its way and abounding in the composer’s deep knowledge of the literature across music history, especially Mozart, Beethoven, and Bruckner (Salonen also trained as a horn player). He colorfully remarked that these moments from the musical past ‘appear and disappear like fish coming to the surface to catch an insect before diving to the depths of the sea again’.
The concerto teems with exposed solo passages that seem to test the limits of breath and control — not to mention imagination, indispensable to giving expressive shape to Salonen’s fertile ideas. Around the horn, the orchestra cast a kaleidoscope of refined colors. The concerto will travel widely in the coming months, so I hope to get a chance for more encounters.
Horn sounds resounded still again, sublimely, in the Sibelius Fifth. Salonen’s control of the art of transition, with subtly judged but dramatically thrilling accelerando, was a marvel. For all the monumentality of the closing chords, I fancied amid their awe an echo of mortality, like the trees being felled at the end of ‘The Cherry Orchard’. But the solace of Sibelius’s glorious Swan Theme circled in the mind’s ear as the swans on Lake Lucerne outside the KKL glided serenely by in serene silence.
Deeply grateful for the chance to experience both Concertgebouworkest concerts at this summer’s Lucerne Festival. On the first night, Janine Jansen seemed to guide us along a silvery path into the stars with Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto — sans the guilt of escapism from a troubled world: the effect was too transfiguring. On either side of the Concerto were
Mozart’s ‘Paris’ Symphony, scintillating with surprise, and a Concerto for Orchestra that caught the double edge of Bartók’s thinking in this last-minute artistic reprieve, the grip of its shadows yet allowing for the persistence of hope.
The second program began with Berio, in his fascinating and now seldom-heard “Rendering”, as he summoned Schubert’s friendly, curious, half-smiling ghost, without a trace of rear-view mirror parody, but neither as a holy relic drifting through fragments. The culmination was pure revelation: Mäkelä led a Mahler Fifth overwhelming in its simultaneity of detail, yet which clarified the sense of Mahler at an existential crossroads in life and art. Above all, the sheer vibrancy of the finale swept away the cranky Adorno-inspired doubts about “happy endings” (though the Seventh remains another story entirely). I really felt as if I were hearing the Fifth for the very first time. Brilliant, packed pre-concert lectures by Lucerne Festival dramaturge Susanne Stähr filled the KKL Auditorium and set the stage for each program.
One of those nights — my insta-review of Sir Simon Rattle’s return to Lucerne, this time with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, to perform Mahler’s Sixth Symphony:
Last night’s interpretation of Mahler’s Sixth by Sir Simon Rattle and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks at Lucerne Festival ranks with the great ones. Rattle has obviously put his all into his recent grapplings with a work that is loaded with special significance for him. (He chose it for their recent North American tour in spring.) This was my first time hearing Rattle conduct the Bavarians, and they’ve clearly forged a strong bond. Their sound has a wonderful darkness and even something almost raw that is burning even at the lyrical. Not a trace of sentimentality – the cowbells actually worked.
Rattle lingered over the “daydreams” embedded in the overall framework. The realization that they insubstantial pageants, fading, happens gradually and was made to underline the tragedy. The Andante (placed, importantly, second in order in Rattle’s interpretation) was especially stirring and emotionally authentic.
Rattle navigated the continual shifts in perspective in the Scherzo and in the vast, unfathomable finale with a translucent attention to detail. The twofold hammer strokes (the third left unstated) seemed a plausible continuation, through the orchestra, of the dramatic thunder-lightning storms of the night before. The final chord’s bitter fadeout was devastating, and it seemed no one wanted to acknowledge it was simply over — was almost afraid to. Immense applause, and Rattle gracefully trying to indicate that he wasn’t begrudging the audience an encore — but that it was simply impossible to continue playing after this. (Fun fact: Not until 1947 did Mahler’s Sixth have its US premiere.)
The eminent German composer Wolfgang Rihm, one of the most frequently performed contemporary composers in Europe and a longstanding pillar of the Lucerne Festival Academy, has died.
“It is with sadness and at the same time with deep gratitude that we take leave of one of the greatest artists of our time and of one of Lucerne Festival’s most influential companions. Wolfgang Rihm was closely associated with Lucerne Festival not only as a composer but, since 2016, as Artistic Director of the Lucerne Festival Academy as well….”
“With Wolfgang Rihm, the music world loses not only a gifted composer, but also a universal scholar, who was as concerned with the promotion of young talent as he was about his personal commitment to cultural policy…”
“Music resembles life, is a reflection of its processes.“– Wolfgang Rihm
The last of the festivals presented by Lucerne Festival in the calendar year, Forward is a fall weekend devoted exclusively to contemporary music and begins today.
Designed and performed by the young musicians of the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO), this year’s edition of Forward features the work of such composers as Julius Eastman, Fausto Romitelli, Rebecca Saunders, Liza Lim, Ragnheiður Erla Björnsdóttir, and Charles Uzor (who discusses his new composition commemorating George Floyd, Katharsis Kalkül, in the video above.
I had discussed the process in depth with both composers over the past spring while compiling Roche’s publication documenting and introducing their new compositions, so it was especially thrilling to be present for this moment, with such palpable creative energy emanating from the immensely talented LFCO players.
A native of Cuenca, Spain, David Moliner was born in 1991 and also performs as a percussionist — a background that has clearly left its mark on Dämonischer Iris, which begins with attention-grabbing thwacks. This is the fourth and last part of his Estructuras cycle of orchestral works that trace his evolution as a composer. Inspired by images and insights from Dante, Goethe, the Symbolist poets, and an epiphany while visiting the illusory Rakotzbrücke near Dresden, Moliner’s piece embraces the contradictions of human experience, including our latent demonic side, mostly hidden away beyond conscious awareness.
Dämonischer Iris made a very strong impression, the audience bringing the excellent conductor Jack Sheen back for another curtain call with their applause. Moliner is a gripping storyteller, creating a sense of suspense at the beginning and then moving in several unexpected directions, swerving from Ligeti-like whimsy (musicians doubling on harmonicas feature among the sound world, along with whistles and birdcalls) to dead-serious intensity as if in a stream of consciousness. After hearing Klaus Mäkelä conduct the Oslo Philharmonic in Scriabin’s Poème de l’extase the previous day, I couldn’t help but think of Dämonischer Iris as a kind of 21st-century counterpart depicting the intensely contradictory character of human nature.
Whistles and harmonicas to defamiliarize the sound, the instrumentalists. Overall thought of an essay on the idea of emotional/tone transitions in a work: where does it “go” from being a parody or ironic to dead serious? Compare this to transitions in use of musical material, the Strauss waltz, the rowdy football song. How much of the violence and terrifying music here is a sort of Freudian ID that we are trying to repress? What is the Reason here? He provokes interesting questions. Prominent descending scale figure. Big Mahlerian trombone solo (or horn?). Imaginative use of the orchestra and of creating suspense. March gestures to get the music moving, on a track. A counterpart to Poeme of Ecstasy — here the intoxication of dark impulses. Anti-ecstasy.
Hovik Sardaryan comes from Sevan, Armenia, where he was born in 1993; he and Moliner are both now based in Berlin. Ikone similarly explores what lies beyond the surface of everyday appearances — yet the two sound worlds invented by these composers could hardly be different. Sardaryan found inspiration in the work of Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov as well as the theory of icons developed by the early-20th-century polymath Pavel Florensky, a Russian Orthodox theologian, engineer, mathematician, and inventor.
Florensky focused on icons as a challenge to the concept of pictorial space developed by Renaissance painters that has prevailed in the West: he explored how the spatial organization of icons from Byzantine and Russian culture negates the linear perspective the West has come to rely on to depict the “real” world. An icon, by contrast, becomes a portal between the viewer’s present reality and transcendence.
Conductor Rita Castro Blanco showed deep sympathy with Sardaryan’s complex score and confidence in how to shape its dense texture of microtonal layers and subtly, constantly shifting tempi — quite an accomplishment, as Ikone clearly showed itself to be the more challenging piece overall for the orchestra. With his astonishingly original tone colors and intriguing musical dramaturgy, Sardaryan invites us to imagine the transcendent perspective from the “other side” of an icon: unlike Wagnerian “time become space,” it suggests a moment of terrifying beauty sub specie aeternitatis.
As if all this weren’t a wonderfully full meal, Enno Poppe, this summer’s composer-in-residence, took the stage after intermission to lead the Swiss premiere of Mathias Spahlinger‘s passage/paysage, a massive orchestral opus from 1989/90 whose rarity in the concert hall is obvious in light of the immense challenges it poses. Poppe offered an elegant and engaging overview of the work and then led the LFCO in a deeply committed performance.
Spahlinger has described the Hegelian “theme” of passage/paysage as “the suspension, decomposition of order through its own regularity.” This idea manifests itself above all through the radical use of contrasts — or static non-contrasts. But the real tour de force comes in the long final section, a prolonged insistence on sonorities organized around the note B, which — as Poppe pointed out — Alban Berg famously used in the murder scene in Wozzeck as a figure for death. Poppe said he finds this among the most gripping finales in the orchestral literature, even comparing it to the dying gestures at the end of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. The strings’ violent pizzicatos seemed to evoke incessant attempts at stoppage, at finding an ending — or perhaps a broken lyre string.
Radio SRF 2 Kultur will rebroadcast the concert on 20 September 2023 at 21:00 (CET) here.
Interview with Moliner on Dämonischer Irishere (in German)
Interview with conductor Jack Sheen on Dämonischer Irishere (in English)
A performance of Mahler’s Third from 2007 by the Lucerne Festival Orchestra with Claudio Abbado
Lucerne’s Summer Festival officially starts today with a performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony by the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this season; Paavo Järvi conducts. This concert launches the 2023 Summer Festival: for the next five weeks, the Festival will explore musical reflections of the theme of “Paradise.” The concert is being streamed live on arte at 19:30 Swiss time.
This evening begins a new mini-spring festival presented by Lucerne Festival: lasting through Sunday, Piano Fest is curated by Igor Levit and features Levit along with his colleagues Fred Hersch and his jazz trio, Johanna Summer, Anna Vinnitskaya, Alexei Volodin, and Mert Yalniz.
As the host of Piano Fest, Igor Levit will be involved in a variety of configurations: in a duo with Igor Volodin, in a joint concert with the jazz musicians Fred Hersch and Johanna Summer, and in a very personal solo recital. The last named will feature such works as Four Serious Songs, in which Johannes Brahms reflects on transience and passing away, along with Sergei Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata, composed during the Second World War, and a brand-new commission written by Fred Hersch, titled Songs Without Words.
Of Fred Hersch, All About Jazz observes: “When it comes to the art of solo piano in jazz, there are two classes of performers: Fred Hersch and everybody else.” Hersch will perform a solo evening and will also appear in a trio with Clemens van der Feen (bass) and Joey Baron (drums).
Piano Fest closes with a meetup between Igor Levit and his master student Mert Yalniz, Fred Hersch, and Johanna Summer: classics like Beethoven’s Appassionata and Schumann’s Waldszenen will be juxtaposed with jazz improvisations.
Lucerne Festival launches its new year tonight with the first offering in a three-day spring celebration featuring the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. Replacing the ailing Riccardo Chailly tonight is Iván Fischer. He leads the orchestra in the continuing Mendelssohn cycle, pairing the First Symphony with music by Schubert and Chopin’s F minor Concerto (Rafał Blechacz the soloist). Listen to Susanne Stähr’s excellent introduction to Mendelssohn’s First (in German) here.
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 