Royal Festival Hall
Biber: Battalia à 10 in D major
Beethoven: Symphony no.2 in D major, op.36
Unsuk Chin: Le Chant des enfants des étoiles (European premiere)
Trinity Boys Choir (director:
David Swinson)
Philharmonia Voices (director:
Aidan Oliver)Philharmonia Orchestra
Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor)
Excellent programming: worthy
of Boulez, if hardly for the literal minded. (‘I think you’ll find [stroking
chin] Beethoven didn’t know Unsuk Chin’s music, or Heinrich Biber’s. So … what
are they doing together then? And … AND … why don’t you use period instruments?
I rest my case!’) Any connections between the first and second halves were not
necessarily explicit; this was not an overtly didactic programme (nothing wrong
with that, of course). Nevertheless, I fancied I could hear certain pitches,
certain turns of phrases, perhaps even certain rhythms, in both; and even if I
could not, contrasts fascinated enough.
There was no doubting the
avant-gardism of either of the first two composers. Biber’s Battalia opened in lively fashion, soon
displaying the composer’s seventeenth-century extended techniques – ‘extended’,
by the standards of many a twentieth-century composer too – with col legno playing and foot stamping in
its opening ‘Sonata’. Members of the Philharmonia under Esa-Pekka Salonen
offered a splendidly cultivated, non-puritanical sound. (Certain journalists,
having learned of a thing called ‘performance practice’ do not like that. They
need rules to help them deliver a ‘verdict’.) Then, to take us all by surprise,
lest we latter-day Friends of Karajan were becoming too pleased with ourselves,
an ‘older, more ‘fiddling’ sound catapulted us back through time to the
bizarre, Ivesian quodlibet of ‘Die leideriche Gesellschaft von allerley Humor’,
horribly hilarious in its ‘wrongness’. (Would we think so, though, if we had
been told it were twenty-first-century music?) Virtuosic solo passages for Mars
– Martian?! – a slow aria whose twists surprised as if they were Purcell’s, a
battle in which the post-Montverdian stile
concitato (and again Purcell) came to mind, and a touching final lament for
‘Verwundten Musquetirer’: these and much more were presented with a relished
concision suggesting that Webern had better look to his laurels – that is, had
the concert-going public ever permitted him to collect them in the first place.
I freely admit that I had not
previously found Salonen’s Beethoven very much to my taste, nor, perhaps more to the point, to my understanding.
This performance of the Second Symphony, also of course in D major, proved very
different, making me keen to hear more. Where previously I had longed for a
more modernistic approach such as I suspected might have been his, here it was:
not for its own sake, but emerging from score and programming alike, almost as
if a Michael Gielen for our times. The opening chord struck me with its rasping
natural trumpets; otherwise, there was nothing – thank goodness – especially ‘period’
about this. Salonen even showed that it is perfectly possible to hear dialogue
between first and second violins without placing them on opposite sides of each
other. The first movement was lively in a different way from Biber, yet
suggestive nevertheless of some sort of kinship. Most notable of all was the
real sense of return at the onset of the recapitulation, of joy in a
Haydnesque, even Handelian manner. The sheer character of the coda made me
smile, as it stormed the heavens in a twenty-first century remodelling of ‘tradition’.
The second movement struck an
excellent balance between neo-Mozartian flow and the ‘late’ Brahmsian future. Gorgeous,
never narcissistic, richness to the inner parts proved an especial joys; as
often with the Philharmonia, I could not help but notice the playing of the viola
section in particular. Mystery and tension in the minor mode were palpable.
This seemed very much a precursor to the ‘slow’ movement of the Eighth, even though
I am not sure that it actually ‘is’. The scherzo was sprightly without tending
towards brutality, as too often it can (say, in the worst of Karajan). Its
musical roots were in Haydn, whilst the Trio peered forward, more ‘modern’ in
material and formal instantiation. The finale proved more brazen even than in
Gielen’s hands. Yet it still had plenty of time to display woodwind charm and
colour. It had space and impetus – which brings us to the second half.
Chin’s Le Chant des Enfants des Etoiles, jointly commissioned by the LOTTE
Group and the Philharmonia, had received its world premiere in 2016 from the
Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra and Myun-Whung Chung, to whom it is dedicated. Written
for children’s choir (here the outstanding Trinity Boys Choir), mixed choir
(Philharmonia Voices, also on excellent form) and large orchestra, it reflects
and even perhaps, whatever her intention or not, ‘expresses’ the composer’s
longstanding interest in physical cosmology, setting related poems from writers
ranging from Henry Vaughan (roughly contemporary with Biber, be it noted),
through Blake, Octavio Paz, Shelley, to Edith Södergran, Fernando Pessoa, Juan
Ramón Rimenez, Eeva-Liisa Manner, and others. The approach is not so
literal-minded as to set them chronologically, but the work itself seemed both
to reprise the exploratory historical path announced in the first half and to
take it further, in dialogue with and yet not bound by those poems. Tension
builds and eventually subsides, perhaps not unlike the life in each of us, every
one a piece of stardust – or even of a star itself.
There was no doubting Chin’s
grateful writing for voices, nor the intelligibility of most of the words. When
one could not immediately discern them, it seemed that that was the point – or at
least that intelligibility was not the priority. I was put in mind from time to
time of Britten’s ability to write for a range of performers, not all of them
professionals, not that, a prominent harp solo notwithstanding, the music
sounded like his. Insofar as I could tell, the singers relished their task; such,
at any rate, was the performative impression. I wondered whether the earliest
sections trod water a little, but perhaps that was more a matter of my ears and
mind taking time to adjust; having looked at the score since, I could not tell you
why. At any rate, once the shimmering stardust really took flight – at least in
my ears – it never looked back. An almost Messiaenesque ecstasy – not as
pastiche, yet in spirit – was to be felt as well as heard. An organ cadenza
seemed to usher in a world of experimental Gothic Romanticism: Prometheus
unbound, or Unbound? Bells, a battery (Biber?) of percussion, gorgeous
harmonies took us to climax, prior to a retreat, or perhaps better a twilight,
the trebles intoning ‘M’illumino d’immenso’ in the final ‘Matin’. Was this work,
was the programme as a whole, more than the sum of its parts? I am not entirely
sure, and why should I be, after a single hearing? I tend, however, to think
so. I should love to hear both again, if not to find out, then to further my
thoughts on the subject. For art, like cosmology, is surely there to broaden
our horizons, to stimulate us, not to provide an answer, nor to be ‘correct’.