Saturday was the big day for the 2023 Roche Young Commissions. Two years after David Moliner and Hovik Sardaryan were announced as the selected composers, the project culminated in a concert in which the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra performed the world premieres of Estructura IV: Dämonischer Iris and Ikone, their respective new works.

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 Iris here (in German)

Interview with conductor Jack Sheen on Dämonischer Iris here (in English)

Interview with Sardaryan on Ikone here (in German)

Interview with conductor conductor Rita Castro Blanco here (in English)

Filed under: commissions, Lucerne Festival, Lucerne Festival Academy, Roche Commissions