Composers will keep revisiting the story of Orpheus: it demands operatic
treatment if it is to be told properly. One must also bear in mind the
rather flattering testimony the story pays to the composer’s art. By the
time Gluck and Calzabigi composed what remains one of the best known operas
on the subject in 1762, the number of operatic treatments stood at fifteen –
and that figure not including numerous dramatic cantatas by, among others,
Charpentier and Rameau. Many of the first experiments in musical theatre
concerned themselves with Orpheus, although in 1600 both Jacopo Peri and
Giulio Caccini titled their proto-operas Euridice, focusing less on the
powers of the Thracian bard than on the figure whose loss inspired him to
retune his lyre to immortal ears. It is something of a joke in the opera
world that in the version by Monteverdi and Striggio, La favola d’Orfeo,
Orpheus succeeds in crossing the Styx not by moving Charon to pity but
simply by sending him to sleep. Orpheus has always been a poster boy for
those who understand music to be the passionate art of persuasion, but he is
arguably no less important a figure to those who see it merely as an aid to
relaxation.
The latest composer to turn – or return – to the legend is Harrison
Birtwistle. It was with his new Orphic meditation that this year’s Aldeburgh
Festival got under way. Jointly commissioned by the festival and the
Southbank Centre, the work takes the form of a double-bill comprising two
apparently distinct but in fact closely related music-theatre pieces. The
first half is given to Semper Dowland, semper dolens, a re-working for small
chamber ensemble of John Dowland’s Lachrimae, or “Seven Passionate Pavans”
originally written for five viols and lute, and here interspersed with six
other original Dowland songs accompanied by harp. The title is taken from
Dowland’s own motto. Orpheus’s story is referred to in the accompanying
ballet – which is also played in reverse on a video backdrop – so that the
exploration of Dowland’s characteristic melancholy emerges as a reflection
on the legend and the circle of love and loss it traces. The second half,
called The Corridor, is a more traditionally conceived and through-composed
music drama. Here the composer and his librettist David Harsent subject the
myth to a kind of microscopic scrutiny, the entire work concerned with the
moment at which Orpheus turns to behold his beloved and with the responses
of each as the implications of Euridice’s “second death” become apparent.
Semper Dowland, in one sense, could hardly be said to constitute a new work at
all, since much of the music heard is not by Birtwistle, and the remainder
is composed “after Dowland”. But the achievement amounts to more than simply
“setting jewels”, as Birtwistle puts it in his programme note. Rather, he
uses his variations to amplify and explode Dowland’s rhetoric of “tearful”
minor sevenths and appoggiaturas. The flute and clarinet first moderate the
viol-like tone of the five string instruments then pull gradually away,
lines and textures dissipating. The two composers’ idioms seem to rub
against each other; while the songs acquire a freshness and sharpness in
their new musical settings, Birtwistle’s interludes glisten with an electric
charge, the build-up occasionally sending motifs bouncing between
instruments like a medieval hocket. The slowmoving choreography works in
parallel, stretching out the lovers’ glances, caresses and gestures of
repulsion, eventually entangling the gaunt figure of Dowland himself.
Although all the notes in the second half are by Birtwistle, the musical and
dramatic contexts of the Dowland variations are carried over into its
close-up focus on the moment of loss. At the same time, Birtwistle’s
particular concern with word-setting and theatrical immediacy pays
dividends. Harsent’s libretto, somewhat sickly when read cold on the page,
comes sharply to life as the shades – represented by five instruments
(flute, clarinet, violin, viola and cello) – entice Elizabeth Atherton’s
delightful Euridice back to Hades. A sixth instrument, the harp, is retained
as the faithful companion to Orpheus, sung by Mark Padmore. I can think of
few tenors better suited to this musical anatomy of melancholy. His voice
frequently takes on a viscous, almost cracked quality which puts one in mind
of the idea – common among Dowland’s contemporaries if not Birtwistle’s – of
the emotional passage of “humours” through the body.
Compared to Birtwistle’s earlier dramatic treatment of the Orpheus story in
The Mask of Orpheus (1985), the new work feels gentler, less contrived. It
is reminiscent of the funereal Cortège from 1986, also written for the
Sinfonietta who played, here, with characteristic sensitivity and
intelligence, discreetly directed by Ryan Wigglesworth, seated with the
audience. The Corridor is also a genuine work of chamber music – not that it
is easily performable – in the sense that each part and line has an expanded
intimacy about it that grants a luminous transparency to the music-making
and storytelling. Conceived as a single contemplation of the origin of music
in lost love, the work is a slight masterpiece, whose slightness enhances
its value.
The idea of setting new works in a wider historical context has always been at
the heart of the Aldeburgh approach to programming. But when it comes to
Elliott Carter, the sense of history is more obviously embodied. Carter, 100
last December, was born five years before Benjamin Britten. And with a whole
weekend devoted to his music, the American composer seemed a good deal more
present in spirit than Britten, too. The Festival’s new director,
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, a protégé of Messiaen and Boulez, is not an
unequivocal admirer of Aldeburgh’s founder, but he gets on very well with
the older composer – as an informal interviewrecital showed. The main event
of the weekend was the premiere of a piece commissioned to mark Carter’s
centenary. On Conversing with Paradise is a setting for baritone and
(largeish) chamber orchestra of an extract from Ezra Pound’s Pisan Canto 81
and a few lines from the unfinished Canto 120. The lines in question – “I
have tried to write paradise / Do not move / Let the wind speak / that is
paradise” – provide the work with its title (via William Blake) and the
occasion for a coda of great beauty in which the vocal line, previously
rather unforgiving and declamatory, soars tranquillo before rising with
measured anger to “speak”.
The Birmingham Contemporary Music Group – together with the Sinfonietta one of
the finest ensembles of its kind in the country – rose to the occasion, as
did the audience in response. Oliver Knussen provided the kind of clear,
knowledgeable direction perhaps only composers really know how to give, and
Leigh Melrose survived the baritone part admirably. The evening also
featured Knussen’s own Coursing (1972) and a new and rather stirring
three-movement work by Helen Grime called A Cold Spring; the testing nature
of the works will be clear if it is understood that Stockhausen –
represented by extracts from his 2007 arrangements of Tierkreis (Zodiac) –
provided the light relief.
I do not think On Conversing will prove to be one of Carter’s more important
works, though of course it is skilfully put together in terms of tone
colour, structure and word-setting. But Three Occasions for Orchestra,
composed in the latter part of the 1980s, and – aside from the funereal
second movement – much lighter in spirit than the new work, is a
masterpiece. A performance of it at Aldeburgh also formed part of one of the
best concerts I have ever had the privilege to witness. George Benjamin
conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a programme that began with
Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and ended with Ravel’s piano
concerto for the left hand; alongside Three Occasions, the central items
were Benjamin’s own recent Duet for piano and orchestra and Julian
Anderson’s Shir Hashirim (2001), a setting of the Song of Solomon chosen to
replace the composer’s new but “indisposed” Fantasias.
Readers of Paul Griffiths’s invaluable book Modern Music learn on the first
page that modernity begins with Debussy’s L’Après-midi. Those who go on to
study the subject at university will be reliably informed otherwise (the
clever thing is to go earlier, or later), but they will be misinformed.
There are of course lots of different ways to understand what constitutes
musical modernity. The Second Viennese School’s atonal sublimation of the
Austro-German symphonic technique of developing variation is one conception
of it. But it is one whose musicological sway and influence have done some
damage. Composers have often looked at the problem in other ways. For
example, the sense of significant inevitability we think of as musical
“logic” can, in non-tonal music, have sources other than thematic
development; it may reside in the exploration of the implications of
(non-tonal) harmony and timbre. In this respect, Debussy’s L’Aprés-midi and
the lugubrious passions unearthed in the passage of its arabesque are as
good a starting point for considerations of the modern as any other. (This
was certainly the opinion of Helen Schlegel in E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End,
although her aunt Mrs Munt, it will be remembered, thought the piece “most
tinkling and superficial”.) What was extraordinary about the Benjamin
concert was that it showed a powerful continuity between the Ravel, the
Debussy and the new works, as if to prove Griffiths’s point. Both the
Debussy and Ravel were taken slowly, but seemed all the more lively for
that, with Benjamin and the orchestra’s fastidious attention to the quality
of the sound much helped by the wonderful, bass-rich acoustic of the Snape
Maltings. Next to the Debussy, Carter’s Occasions triptych and, especially,
Anderson’s Shir Hashirim, took on extra body, the exoticism of the Anderson
work in particular emerging as a kind of further adventures of Debussy’s and
Mallarmé’s faun (albeit a faun with a rather surprising aptitude for
bible-learning). Susanna Andersson, the soprano soloist in Shir Hashirim,
sang as though the work had been composed for her.
Benjamin’s “duet”, receiving its UK premiere, was written for Pierre-Laurent
Aimard. The work is emphatically not a concerto. Rather it is a marriage,
and Benjamin’s efforts towards wedding the piano’s distinctive “dying” tone
to the sustained quality of the orchestral sound were rewarded by a first-
class performance in which the timbral priority really did shift and swirl
almost imperceptibly around the stage. That said, although tightly packed,
it is not a difficult work in the virtuosic sense – and Aimard, the limits
of whose playing no composer has yet managed to find, may have expected
something a little more substantial in the solo department. He had the
Ravel, of course, but even here the virtuoso aspect somehow slipped by
unnoticed as an evening’s “tinklings” and “superficialities” revealed
themselves to be a sure pathway to the modernistic sublime.
Virtuosity came in a different form with the premiere of Thomas Adès’s Lieux
retrouvés for cello and piano. This was originally scheduled for last year,
Adès’s last as director of the festival, and audience anticipation was
heightened by rumours that Steven Isserlis was plain terrified, having at
first considered the cello part too difficult to play. In the event – though
both parts are undoubtedly challenging – the work turned out to be a
charming set of character pieces, reminiscent of Couperin’s harpsichord
miniatures, or Watteau’s paintings. In four movements – with titles in
French, I imagine, to make such connections more explicit – Adès and
Isserlis guided us over the smooth and sparkling waters, up the mountain to
its oxygen-starved summit, through fields with something Elysian about them,
and, finally, into the comic bustle of the modern town. Musically the
movements are detailed, often complex in terms of technique and procedure.
The cross-rhythms representing the stirring of waters in the first movement
require the cellist to play across all four strings with immense rhythmic
precision, while the oddly vertiginous conclusion of “Les Champs” requires
perfect intonation at the highest extremity of the instrument. The piano
part isn’t easy, either; and although Adès has a way of always looking
surprised by the notes he sees on the page, he played with characteristic
expressive sensitivity to his partner. The overall sense is of a set of
highly nuanced impressions accurately captured and finely worked.
