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.
Lucerne Festival’s three-day fall edition devoted to contemporary music starts today. The opening program of Forward takes place at the Swiss Museum of Transport planetarium and is centered around the Swiss premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Enigma for string quartet, featuring with 360-degree video by Sigurður Guðjónsson.
Telescope meets microscope: let’s shake up the relationship between outside and inside, between macrocosm and microcosm! Under the massive planetarium dome at the Swiss Museum of Transport, you will zoom into the infinite expanses of the universe, accompanied by improvisations. Sigurður Guðjónsson’s immersive 360-degree video Enigma also makes visible what is normally hidden from the human eye: with the help of an electron microscope, Guðjónsson scans the surface of a carbon fragment – suggestive images reminiscent of Martian landscapes. In tandem with the sounds of Anna Thorvaldsdottir, which oscillate subtly between flow and fragmentation, they combine to form a hypnotizing Gesamtkunstwerk.
Following several days of showcasing the young generation with performances by various youth orchestras, Lucerne Festival’s summer of music for 2022 officially launches tomorrow, 12 August. Riccardo Chailly will conduct the Lucerne Festival Orchestra in a program of music by Wolfgang Rihm, Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and Rachmaninoff, with Anne-Sophie Mutter as the soloist in Saint-Georges’ Violin Concerto in A major, Op. 5, no. 2.
This summer’s theme is “Diversity.” The Festival describes the program as follows:
“For a long stretch, until the post-war decades, time seemed to stand still in the classical music scene. Orchestras were a male domain — women could only be found playing the harp or in the ranks of the violins. People of color were almost non-existent, and Asian women had to fight for their place on the stage. Of course, the leadership was also in male hands: the conductor was to be addressed as “maestro” or, in German orchestras, as “Meister” or “Herr Professor.” The repertoire, in turn, was limited to the Eurocentric canon of works, including the Viennese classics, the German-Austrian Romantics, plus Italian opera and a few coloristic touches from the fringes of Europe. This monoculture even persisted with respect to the audience, since access was found primarily among educated bourgeois circles who had enough income for musical pursuits.
A great deal has of course changed since then, yet a lot still remains to be done. Through this summer’s theme of “Diversity,” we want to make a plea for genuine diversity in classical music. That is why we have invited artists from demographic groups that were previously underrepresented in the scene. A number of women have made their mark on the program, and many works that are inherently diverse or have never been heard here before will be performed. And with affordable offers like the “Overture” presented by international youth orchestras, we hope to prove that enjoying classical music is not a question of money. Because music is for everyone.”
Tonight in Lucerne, the festival year will be launched with a three-day Mendelssohn Festival — which is also the first in a new spring residency for the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and Riccardo Chailly that will complement their customary Summer Festival performances.
This mini-Spring Festival will explore Mendelssohn in conjunction with his leading contemporaries, including, for the opening tonight, with his chief antagonist, Richard Wagner.
Anne-Sophie Mutter and friends will also join with musicians from the Lucerne Festival Orchestra for a special benefit concert for Ukraine on Saturday, performing chamber music by Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Shostakovich.
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.
Bernard Haitink has died. The 92-year-old conductor passed away peacefully at home, according to his representatives.
I had the privilege of attending his very final concert, in the summer of 2019, when he led the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra at Lucerne Festival. He maintained a close association with Lucerne for many years, including a nearby residence. Haitink’s farewell song was Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 (without score), paired with Beethoven’s G major Piano Concerto, with Emanuel Ax as the soloist.
Christian Wildhagen penned an eloquent review: ““Hatte er zuvor bei Beethovens 4. Klavierkonzert vorrangig Emmanuel Ax, einem feinsinnigen Pianisten der alten Schule, in nobel-zurückhaltender Weise die Bühne bereitet, so kam bei Bruckner noch einmal der grosse Architekt, der überragende Formgestalter Haitink zur Geltung. Wie beim späten Günter Wand wird die Detailarbeit hier mitnichten zur Nebensache, sie bildet aber lediglich die Basis für eine viel weiter ausgreifende Gestaltung, in der Entwicklungen teilweise über drei, vier Minuten behutsam entfaltet werden (etwa in der magischen Rückführung zur Reprise im ersten Satz oder beim grossen Wagner-Epitaph im Adagio), während sich die Spannungsbögen sogar bruchlos über ganze Sätze wölben.”
That summer–the last before the pandemic–there was also a vernissage for the publication of Erich Singer and Peter Hagmann’s fine collection of essays and conversations with Haitink: Dirigieren ist ein Rätsel. An English translation has yet to be issued.
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 