Dramatic Beauty in Music and Vision May 16

Dramatic Beauty
Works by Eötvös and Bartók,
reviewed by GIUSEPPE PENNISI

It is always a thrill to listen to a new composition conducted by the composer himself, especially if the composer is highly appreciated by the listener. I much enjoyed Peter Eötvös' Le Balcon at the 2002 Aix-en-Provence Festival and consider Trois Soeurs one of the best contemporary operas -- I know it only through the recording conducted by Kent Nagano. As his recent Glyndebourne opera, Love and Other Demons, so vividly demonstrated, Peter Eötvös has a blistering talent for orchestral color. And there was plenty of orchestral color at the National Academy of Santa Cecilia main symphony hall on 2 May 2011 when, as a part of a series of three concerts, Eötvös conducted his own concerto for violin and orchestra and Béla Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle. An interesting and well received attempt to bring contemporary and twentieth century music to subscribers mostly accustomed to eighteenth and nineteenth century repertory.
Eötvös's violin concerto is called Seven (Memorial for the Columbia Astronauts). It was composed as a requiem for the astronauts of the Space Shuttle who died on 1 February 2003 when their ship exploded in the sky over Texas. 'Seven' refers to the number of astronauts who were killed in the disaster. It was premièred at the 2007 Lucerne Festival under Pierre Boulez's baton. Eötvös himself describes the work as a 'very personal monologue and the musical expression of my sympathy towards the seven astronauts who lost their lives while exploring space in fulfillment of a fundamental dream of mankind.'

Peter Eötvös and Patricia Kopatchinskaja perform 'Seven'. Photo © 2011 Musacchio & Ianniello. Click on the image for higher resolution
More than a requiem, the piece is a two-movement elegy without any religious atmosphere. Soloist Patricia Kopatchinskaja launches straight in on high, with stratospheric violin textures offset by ensemble sounds so tantalizing you have to scrutinize each player to work out how the effect is made. Since a keyboard sampler forms part of the mix, you often remain merely bewitched and bewildered. Creating an unsettling stereophonic impact, six violinists were positioned around the first tier of the huge concert hall, their solo voices speaking in signal and response to Kopatchinskaja, who continued her journey of poetic rhapsody alone on stage. The sense of figures lost in space was only too vivid, and expertly performed by all.
The concert hall setup gave the first hint that Eötvös comes from a recent avant-garde tradition -- an avant-garde closer to the French than to the German experience. Four nearly identical groups of percussion, each dominated by a hanging gong, were on a raised platform at the back. Fanned out between them and the podium was the orchestra, grouped not by instrumental types but in the manner of several mini-orchestras with mixed strings, woodwinds, and brass. Also, spread along the length of the first tier walkway -- as mentioned -- were six other 'satellite' string players. Making use of several compositional techniques and drawing from the different musical and cultural traditions, Seven has lots of dissonant and atonal clusters that may not be appreciated by more traditional listeners but that delighted your reviewer. After a few seconds of shock, the audience applauded warmly. My impression is that their applause was more for the performers, especially the soloist, than for the violin concerto.
After the twenty minutes of Eötvös' concerto, the program included the sixty minutes of Bartók's only opera, Bluebeard's Castle. A hundred years ago, it was considered avant-garde, ie Hungarian avant-garde molded by the experience of listening to Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande. Thus, in a way, the concert was a travel through a century of Magyar avant-garde music. Bluebeard's Castle was finished in 1911 (when Bartók was just thirty years old) on a text by Béla Balász, a Hungarian poet of some prominence at that time, but for an array of musicological and political reasons was staged only in 1918; it had an immediate but short-lived success because the final months of World War I had darkened over the Hungarian musical scene. Outside Hungary, the opera has been slow in making headway in opera houses. The main reason was its unusual structure: a large, almost oversized, orchestra and only two singers (a dramatic soprano/mezzo and a baritone/bass). There were long, and rather peculiar disputes, as to whether Bluebeard's Castle should be considered a fully-fledged opera, a 'scenic symphony' or a 'drama accompanied by a symphony'. Albeit these disputes can be dismissed as pedantic, in my impression it works more effectively in a concert hall than in an opera house.

Front right, from left to right: Ildiko Komlosi, Peter Eötvös and Peter Fried with, behind them, the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, during the performance of Bartók's 'Bluebeard's Castle'. Photo © 2011 Musacchio & Ianniello. Click on the image for higher resolution
I saw it fully staged in Rome, Budapest, Palermo and Washington. As times and tastes have changed, the symbolic libretto 'à la Maeterlinck' is the part of the work which has been shown to be less robust. Without the symbolic paraphernalia, Bluebeard's Castle shows all its dramatic beauty: the secrets included in man's interior world. The music, more than the text, demonstrates how each of us contains the best and the worst in our material condition and only the shining intoxication of fresh love can sometime dissipate the dark threat. In Bartók, however, the hidden places of the masculine self are forbidden even to his new love. In that, he is a clear son of his times; the basic assumption is masculine superiority even though tempered by a parallel assumption of women's 'hidden places for themselves'. The fresh love is the bridge to pass from bestial cruelty and lust for power to the pleasures of material gains and aesthetic gratification and, finally, lordship over a large and peaceful kingdom. The musicologist David Johnson rightly wrote that 'Bartók found the right musical expression for each part of this large design and yet never lost sight of the totality of the design. In the end we are surprised not by the complexity of Bluebeard's Castle but by its beautiful simplicity'.

From left to right: Peter Fried, Ildiko Komlosi and Peter Eötvös at the end of the performance of Bartók's 'Bluebeard's Castle'. Photo © 2011 Musacchio & Ianniello. Click on the image for higher resolution
Eötvös had at his baton one of the best European symphony orchestras and two excellent singers, Ildiko Komlosi and Peter Fried. The orchestral score is extremely colorful and, at the same time, tense. Peter Fried has a part centered on declamation, whilst Ildiko Komlosi hazards more rhythmic variety, almost seeming to want to loosen the rigidity in which she is contained. They did quite well.
There were ten minutes of applause.
Copyright © 16 May 2011 Giuseppe Pennisi,
Rome, Italy

BELA BARTOK
HUNGARY
ROME
ITALY
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