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.
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
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)
This weekend, Lucerne Festival will launch the first edition of its Forward Festival devoted to contemporary music. Members of the international Lucerne Festival Academy network have spearheaded this new fall initiative, which has been curated by a team of 18 members. The organizing theme is “networks” and the process of forging connections and achieving closer communication with the audience.
The opening event pays tribute to the late Louis Andriessen Friday evening, 19 November, at 10:00 pm CET, with a raucous performance of Workers Union (video intro here).
Winnie Huang will create 10-minute performances for just one guest at a time throughout the festivaland Annea Lockwood’s Water and Memory and Michael Pisaro’s ricefall will similarly engage listeners. In, ricefall, for example, the participants let grains of rice trickle like rain onto various objects and surfaces, enabling an immersive and meditative sound experience. Olga Neuwirth was inspired by Ray Bradbury’s science fiction story “The Long Rain” to create her work of spatial music Construction in space: The sound is in motion, with the audience located right in the middle. Pauline Oliveros’ Out of the Dark, performed in complete darkness, is also conceived as spatial music and, like Lockwood, aims at “deep listening”: the listeners immerse themselves in the time-space continuum of the sound and become part of it.
A new piece by the Swiss percussionist and composer Jessie Cox will also be premiered — one of six works commissioned by the curatorial team to explore and exploit the architecture and acoustics unique to the KKL Concert Hall. “Networks” are additionally at the center of the various models of musical self-organization which Luis Fernando Amaya’s Tinta Roja, Tinta Negra, José-Luis Hurtado’s Retour, and George Lewis’s Artificial Life 2007 explore in open scores that work with improvisational elements.
One of the programs I’m most looking forward to in Lucerne is the Academy Alumni Orchestra program this Sunday, which will be led by Riccardo Chailly, music director of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra.
Yesterday, Wolfgang Rihm and Mariano Chiacchiarini introduced the culminating work of the program: Rihm’s early orchestral composition Dis-Kontur from 1974, which starts off with a post-’68 generation update of the catastrophic hammer blows familiar from Mahler, Berg, and Schoenberg. As Ulrich Mosch writes:
Fundamental to Rihm’s pieces for orchestra was his decision to refrain from transforming the orchestra into a large, structurally controlled “sound generator” and from reinventing the ensemble by taking the approach of reorganising it according to “internal, social” assumptions – a co-op effort of equally entitled individuals or a self-regulating social and musical system, for instance.
The rest of the program that Chailly will conduct the Soviet Alexander Mosolov’s The Iron Foundry, Bruno Maderna’s Grande Aulodia for flute and oboe solo with orchestra (Swiss premiere), and Schoenberg’s Five Orchestra Pieces.
To the Orchestra of the Lucerne Festival Academy fell the honor of closing out the 2018 Musikfest Berlin — and what could possibly top their rendition of Stockhausen’s INORI as the final act?
Led by Peter Eötvös, the Academy musicians found themselves on the stage of one of the most sacrosanct spaces of Berlin’s music scene, the Philharmonie, playing the Berlin premiere of the full version of Stockhausen’s intensely beautiful “Adorations” for large orchestra and two “dancer-mimes” (hitherto given here only in a reduced version).
They’d spent the summer rehearsing it and presenting it as part of the Stockhausen homage at Lucerne Festival — the two pairs of artists who undertook the unusually demanding dancer-mime roles spent the past year mastering their parts — and everything was in place for Stockhausen’s weirdly gripping, transporting music of the spheres to cast its spell.
Spirituality and ritual comprised a thematic focus for several of the Musikfest programs. Stockhausen’s gathering of ageless gestures of prayer and worship that have been used across global cultures conveyed a contemporary longing to transcend the mania of our fragmented, restless lives and attention spans in this late-capitalist era.
Trained under the supervision of Kathinka Pasveer, Alain Louafi, and Peter Eötvösm Winnie Huang and Diego Vásquez were the dancer-mimes in this performance. At the start, they ascended the steps to the two raised platforms positioned downstage, where over the course of the 70-minute work they performed Stockhausen’s meticulously notated gestures, in sync with changes in the pitch, rhythm, and dynamics of the music. INORI has been described as a sister work to GRUPPEN, but here the focus is on synchrony rather than simultaneously unfolding polychronies.
Mostly performing from a seated position, the dancer-mimes eventually descended again from their perch, slowly retreating to an exit high behind the stage, like Bodhisattvas who have fulfilled their mission.
The talented young conductor Ruth Reinhardt, who returns to Seattle Symphony for a major concert next month (where she was a Conducting Fellow in 2015-16), led an impressive performance of Luigi Nono’s No hay caminos, hay que caminar … Andrej Tarkowskij this past Sunday — one of the highlights of this year’s Lucerne Festival Academy.
Reinhardt gave a brief introduction to this highly challenging piece, suggesting the possibility of perceiving in the highly structured, subtle transformations to which Nono subjects his material a “metaphor for the human journey, our pilgrimage through life.
The Nono work explores spatial music as well, with discrete groups of the players subdivided into seven and positioned throughout the hall. Before and after this concert (which also included Messiaen’s awe-inducing, terrifyingly loud Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum for winds and percussion, led by Sir Simon Rattle), the Orchestra of the Lucerne Festival Academy joined the London Symphony for Stockhausen’s Gruppen.
A fascinating juxtaposition: the devoutly Catholic Messiaen, the resolutely atheist Nono.
Getting ready to take in my first experience of Lucerne Festival’s Kosmos Stockhausen series: a seven-concert homage to the powerful postwar avant-garde guru marking what would have been his 90th birthday this year.
My adventure will begin with this afternoon’s program of GESANG DER JÜNGLINGE, REFRAIN, ZYKLUS, and KONTAKTE, featuring Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Helga Karen on keyboards, Dirk Rothbrust on percussion, and sound designer Marco Stroppa.
Then comes a solo recital with Aimard performing KLAVIERSTÜCKE I-XI, GRUPPEN with the London Symphony and Lucerne Festival Orchestra (and, as the three conductors, Simon Rattle, Jaehyuck Choi, and Duncan Ward).
I wasn’t able to make the most-touted of the series, INORI in its Swiss premiere, but I’m planning to catch it during the Academy’s tour in Berlin as part of the Musikfest Berlin.
Katharina Thalmann offers a preview of INORI for the Luzerner Zeitunghere. From her interview with the composer and conductor Peter Eötvös, who collaborated closely with Stockhausen, comes this observation about the work’s contemporary resonance:
Trotzdem: «Die Interpreten in diesem Projekt kommen aus der ganzen Welt zusammen, dadurch wird die multikulturelle Haltung von Stockhausen hier in Luzern am besten repräsentiert.» Denn fast scheint es, als hätte Stockhausen mit «Inori» in die Zukunft komponiert. Die mannigfaltigen religiösen und spirituellen Symbole, die in dem Werk aufeinandertreffen, nehmen das Konzept der Globalisierung vorneweg. Diese Weltvorstellung repräsentiert die heterogene, multikulturelle Zusammensetzung des Academy-Orchesters perfekt.
Manuel Brug writes about INORIhere.
And in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Jürg Huber offers this commentary.
Recently, I had one of my most remarkable experiences in the concert hall ever. In the middle of this summer’s Lucerne Festival, this was a performance that I was initially only “curious” to hear, bringing no real expectations with me. The program consisted of the complete Spiegel by Austrian composer Friedrich Cerha, being given its belated Swiss premiere as a full 90-minute cycle, performed by the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra with Matthias Pintscher on the podium.
As my friend visiting that day remarked, “This music is so human. Despite everything going on, it’s incredible that we can still do things like this.” The Spiegel Cycle, understandably a rarity to encounter live — and that’s the only real way to encounter it, especially in such a committed performance from these enormously talented young musicians — is a landmark of 20th-century “originality,” often tagged as an instance of the Klangflächenkomposition movement, in which the actual sonorities produced by an orchestra provide the center of interest (think Ligeti and Xenakis).
But unlike, say, Ligeti, who can sound more “otherworldly” in comparison, Cerha’s unprecedented experiments in this direction seem to implicitly evoke more “accessible” dramatic impulses without losing anything of their audacity and originality.
In a talk beforehand, the 91-yer-old Cerha, who still composes, spoke of a twofold connotation in his choice of the title Spiegel. One is architectural: the overall design is an arch form, with movements mirroring one another around the central Spiegel IV: III and V share certain characteristics, as do II and VI and I and VII, a summarizing movement that also mirrors what has gone before. And there are internal cross-references within the individual movements.
The second connotation Cerha mentioned is autobiographical, though he says he didn’t come to realize this until the 1980s, long after he began the project in 1960 and assumed what he was writing was so outrageous it would never actually be performed. Spiegel can be seen as a reflection of and coming to terms with his traumatizing experiences in the Second World War, when he was drafted as a teenager and deserted. But like any great work of art, the ultimate reflection will be of the experience the listener brings to it.
The concept of composing without motifs, themes, counterpoint, rhythmic phrases — all the traditional “thinking” processes of Western music — is incredibly liberating, but also frightening. In some ways, it’s reminiscent of Baroque Affekt in terms of the mood that dominates a movement. But the emotional complexity elicited is of a high order.
Cerha even foregoes the instinct to use the orchestra in terms of its choirs. All of the voices of his enormous orchestral apparatus are autonomous, though they do gather and unite to thrilling effect. Pintscher conducted with his hands and inspired the young players to new heights. Each Spiegel called for a separate score, which he ritually put to the side when done, pulling out the next one. His control of the massive crescendos that gradually detonate was remarkable, Pintscher practically flying with wing-like arms).
The climax to end all climaxes that arrives in Spiegel VII brings with it something beyond catharsis: a power of expression that sees hope beyond the devastation in the very fact that it can be articulated by such art.
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 