The third concert I went to at Lucerne last week was under two aegises: first ‘Faith’, the theme of this year’s Festival, and second ‘Pollini Perspectives’. Maurizio Pollini coined this phrase or concept several years ago, as indicating his project of giving concerts in which he combines music we know and love with music we don’t know and hate — not that he put it in those terms, but that’s what it amounts to. The latter is always in the first half, naturally.
At Lucerne it was not Maurizio, but his gifted pianist son Daniele who took part in the first half, which was the first performance of Carnaval Nos 10, 11 and 12, by the distinguished Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino. He was with the immensely virtuosic Klangform Wien, consisting on this occasion of two flutes, two clarinets, two trombones, two cellos and percussion, together with five of the New Vocal Soloists of Stuttgart. Anyone at all au fait with contemporary music would be able to deduce from that list alone what Carnaval 10–12 is like.
Billed as lasting about 23 minutes, it was actually more like 45. I found it torture, and I suspect that a large proportion of the audience did, though the work and its amiable composer were given a warm and prolonged reception. Sitting a few places along from Boulez, I was tempted to ask him how he found it, but my nerve failed me. The outer movements set two short poems of Sciarrino, who is much influenced by ‘Asian sources’. But the texts, printed in the programme, emerge one unrecognisable syllable at a time, so they are, in any ordinary sense, unfollowable. Much the same is true of the instrumental music, which manifests Sciarrino’s fascination with silence, fragmentation, and so forth. I strove to find a way into at least some of this work — I don’t enjoy sitting in mere bafflement — but I wasn’t able to.
I believe that a major part of Pollini’s agenda is to illuminate the new by the old and vice versa. But the only thing that’s necessary to illuminate works as supreme as Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas is a performance as transcendental as Pollini gave them on this occasion — and possibly the marvellous description of Opus 111 in Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus, though the passage was mainly written by Adorno.
Whereas in some recent concerts I have found Pollini disengaged, here his commitment was evident. Dressed informally, he scuttled across to the piano, seeming excited at the prospect of what he was about to play. And the performances themselves were not typical of what Pollini has been like over the years. The rhapsodic, improvisatory style of the first movement of Opus 109 was precisely caught, and the variations unfolded with serene implacability. Pollini, 70 this year, still has all the muscle required for the ferocious scherzo of Opus 110 and the first movement of Opus 111, which received the most convincing treatment I have heard. If ‘Faith’ is really a useful term to use in relation to music, then perhaps the sublime second movement might at least illuminate what it is like to be blessed by Faith, even if you might feel like that without there being anything in the world to justify it. For the rest of us such sublimity exists without bearing testimony to anything other than Beethoven’s creativity, fully realised on this overwhelming occasion.
Back to earth with the Grimeborn Festival in Dalston, a worthy enterprise of bringing opera to places it normally doesn’t reach. It has a lot in common with Tête à Tête, but that organisation wisely confines itself to new or evolving pieces, while at Dalston there are those, and obscure 20th-century operas, and also some classics done on the cheap. Unable this year to go to any of the new works, I went to Heritage Opera’s production of The Marriage of Figaro, and found it a lesson in exactly how not to treat Mozart. There is piano accompaniment only, but that can be lived with, if the pianist is good enough, and this one was; but the Overture was abridged and Figaro and Susanna’s second duet was omitted.
In the small temporary space, used while ‘a 300-seat eco-theatre’ is being built, we were bawled at mercilessly by all the cast, which matched its vocal efforts with appalling ham acting, every joke nailed to the floor. There were some talented and not unknown singers, but the whole enterprise was sabotaged by a comprehensive denial of everything that Mozart stands for and embodies. What is the point of having the characters dressed in period costume, more or less, but singing in a slangy contemporary idiom? There’s no doubt about what is going on in Figaro, but the miracle is that it is all presented in impeccable taste. That’s such an elementary reflection that I can only think that Heritage Opera brushed it aside, disastrously.
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