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Thursday 4 December 2008

Whisper or scream

Robin Holloway attends the Spanish premiere of Helmut Lachenmann's Little Match Girl

Now comes an interminable slow solo for the Chinese sho...At this point your reviewer’s spirit, hitherto bored-but-unbowed, began to jib. What colossal self-indulgence! A sho; a whole chorus to rustle and mutter more than they sing; two accomplished soloists mainly to hiss, spit and screech; two grand pianos whose principal employment is to produce antiphonies of pitchless death-watch-beetle ticktocktackings; masses of electronic hardware and software. Not since the inordinate extravagance of the Henze/Bond We Come to the River at Covent Garden in 1976 have I experienced such conspicuous wastefulness in an art-work. Whatever Lachenmann’s undoubted personal modesty and moderation (unlike his aforementioned precursor), the aesthetic self-indulgence is outrageous. Which leads one to question the tendentious claims made for him, and by him (in an on-the-whole simpatico televised pre-concert interview): all the old threadbare avant-garde flannel about music newly liberated to make its own space, etc. — as if all music since ever, and especially since its elevation into ‘the art to which all others aspire’ — the substitute for religion that arguably does it better and certainly achieves it with less damage — hasn’t fulfilled such vaunted claims all along, with no fuss, no pretentiousness, no conceptualisations (and, mostly, with economy and point).

Wit, charm, grace, volatility; harmony, melody, rhythm; slow and fast; such music cannot do any of these. What it can do is violence, terror, tension, angst, distress, pain; the uncanny, the alien, the visionary, the apocalyptic. It sounds like a lot! But is it enough? Inasmuch as these very generalised moods and states can be readily taken in on the basis of unmistakable sensory signals, Lachenmann’s sounds ‘communicate’. But of music as speech and language, attuned to ears that interpret and connect, and in doing so relay messages comprehended by head and heart (and limbs and loins), there is left the mere residue. Ears can be stretched and surprised and changed in extraordinary ways: thence can thus the understanding to which they form music’s sole channel. The history of the art down its long centuries of evolving change proves this again and again in perpetual renewal. And maybe this is still true chez Lachenmann.

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