Illuminating the Spectrum in Music and Vision 30 agosto

Illuminating the Spectrum
Contemporary music at Salzburg,
heard by GIUSEPPE PENNISI

For the last five years, Kontinent has been a festival of contemporary music within the broader Salzburg Summer Festival. It might be more appropriate to use the past tense and to say that Kontinent was a marvelous five year experience, as was its predecessor, Zeitfluss, in the 1990s. It has been made crystal clear both to music critics and audience that, for the time being, the new Director General wants at least a pause in the experiment. Nonetheless, it is useful to recall that the concerts and the operas performed as a part of Kontinent were all sold out: also they brought to the banks of the river Salzach an audience, younger and in less formal attire, thus quite different from the subscribers to the main Festival series. Only God knows whether, after a couple of years of 'pause', Alexander Pereira will change ideas and contemporary music will again have its own niche at the Summer Festival. In the immediate future, though, contemporary music will have its short pre-Christmas Salzburg Festival organized by that little devil named Gustav Kuhn; the Festival is titled Delirium.

Salvatore Sciarrino, Anna Radziejewska and Otto Katzameier in Sciarrino's 'Macbeth' at the Salzburg Summer Festival. Photo © 2011 Silvia Lelli. Click on the image for higher resolution
Each of the four previous Kontinent festivals were dedicated to only one composer in this chronological order: Giacinto Scelsi, Salvatore Sciarrino, Edgard Varèse and Wolfgang Rhim. The fifth and, for the time being, the last of the Kontinent series offered three great stage works: Prometeo, Tragedia dell'Ascolto by Luigi Nono, Macbeth by Salvatore Sciarrino and Neither by Morton Feldman. There were also concerts (and also a ballet) with music composed by Edgard Varèse, Claude Vivier, Iannis Xenakis, Gérard Grisey, John Cage, Georg Friedrich Haas, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Giacinto Scelsi. Scelsi, who never considered himself to be a composer, thus opened Kontinent in 2007 and closed it in 2011.

David Haller, Rumi Ogawa-Helferich and Boris Müller in Luigi Nono's 'Prometeo' at the Salzburg Summer Festival. Photo © 2011 Silvia Lelli. Click on the image for higher resolution
Hence, the fifth edition of Kontinent offered a full overview of contemporary music in the post World War II era: the twelve note row system heightened in Darmstadt, the political and social protest of Nono and Stockhausen, the search by Varèse for increasingly more sophisticated elegance, the improvisation of Cage, the concise tension of Sciarrino, and outliers -- like Xenakis and Scelsi -- who did not belong to any school or tendency. To stage Prometeo by Nono, as we know, is a Herculean task because of the resources it requires; yet in spite of its difficulties, it has been staged in over thirty different places since its 1985 premiere. The compact Macbeth by Sciarrino has had several performances since its 2002 premiere in Schwetzingen; in Salzburg it was nearly juxtaposed with the Verdi Macbeth being performed in the main Festival under the musical direction of Riccardo Muti and the stage direction of Peter Stein.

The Zehetmair Quartet (Ruth Killius, Ursula Smith, Kuba Jakowicz and Thomas Zehetmair) at the Salzburg Summer Festival. Photo © 2011 Wolfgang Lienbacher. Click on the image for higher resolution
During my week in Salzburg I could not listen to all the concerts. Thus, I made a selection which could appear peculiar: on 15 August 2011, I went to the elegant Mozarteum Grosser Saal where the Zehetmair Quartet played two rarely performed Beethoven string quartets and the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard played Ives' Piano Sonata No 2, then on 16 August to the especially equipped caverns to listen to two equally rare Scelsi string quartets and Haas' String Quartet No 3 'In iij Noct'. There is not only a temporal logic in the choice (ie the proximity of the dates of the two concerts): Beethoven's two quartets (No 131 and No 135) are extremely modern, with an almost contemporary sound. The Quartet No 131 in C sharp minor embraces the widest gamut of form, texture and feeling, ranging from the remote beauty of the initial fugue to the popular tune of the scherzo to the nearly truculent pathos of the finale. It is nearly an anticipation of Mahler's Third Symphony, indeed of Mahler's sentence that 'music must contain the whole world'. After such a huge and unusual expansion, Quartet No 135 in D flat returns to the dimension and the spirit of Haydn and Mozart but it is almost hyperactive, full of variations, and more concise than most of Beethoven's work. As a connection between the two, Pierre-Laurent Aimard played the monumental one hour Sonata No 2 Concord by Charles Ives, an eclectic group of piano pieces now recognized as an idiosyncratic twentieth century masterpiece, at once a response and a tribute to some nineteenth century American writers and to the European classical and romantic musical tradition. As an encore they played a Schumann work for piano quintet. Thus, the most modern Beethoven, the most eclectic Ives, and the romantic Schumann for a total of nearly three hours of chamber music in the Mozarteum.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the Salzburg Summer Festival. Photo © 2011 Wolfgang Lienbacher. Click on the image for higher resolution
Pierre-Laurent Aimard needs no presentation due to his wide international career, especially in contemporary music (eg his long association with Boulez, Ligeti, Rhim and Stockhausen). The Zehetmair Quartet is one of the most highly regarded string quartets in Europe. Embarking on their first tour together in 1998, the quartet have astounded audiences with their technical brilliance ever since. They are regular performers at famous international summer festivals such as Edinburgh, Helsinki and Schleswig Holstein. Their Salzburg debut was last year. Thus, the quartet and the pianist belong to different schools, even though the Zehetmair Quartet recording gives emphasis to twentieth century music -- their recording of Hindemith's Fourth Quartet and Bartók's Fifth was awarded the Diapason d'Or. They molded beautifully in the concert, attracting the audience's attention and participation, in spite of the unusual length.

The Stadler Quartet at a recording session in Berlin. Photo © space-unit.de. Click on the image for higher resolution
The connection with the Scelsi and Haas concert, entrusted to the Salzburg-based Stadler Quartet (specializing in contemporary music) is many fold. Firstly in the 1980s, the string quartet was considered a musical species on its way to extinction; for instance The New Grove spoke of the 'imminent end' and Ludwig Finsher of a 'largely disbanded' form. In the final part of the twentieth century, however, the string quartet started a new season, mostly due to Italian composers such as Berio, Bussotti, Maderna, Sciarrino, Donatoni and even the 'non-composer' Scelsi. Interestingly, their production has a link with the innovation of Beethoven last quartets. Scelsi's String Quartet No 4 (1964) and No 5 (1985-86) as well as Haas' 2001 Nocturnal Quartet appear as great grand children of the Beethoven Quartets Nos 131 and 135 because of their emphasis on micro-variation. The Scelsi Quartets are on a single note. In Quartet No 4, focal pitches, timbre and microtonality all feature, but one of the most interesting aspect of the work is the way how Scelsi combines all these aspects to create form, phrasing and harmony. In Quartet No 5, his last work, on matrix style, the note F is slowly fanned out into a cluster, giving up its tonal qualities, to resound in the finale with a powerful vibrato. Whereas Scelsi's Quartets illuminate the spectrum of the single note, Haas' microtonal In iij Noct, to be played in full darkness and with the four soloists at the corners of the hall, brings to the listeners all the sounds of the night. The concert was warmly applauded by the audience in the large caverns.
Copyright © 30 August 2011 Giuseppe Pennisi,
Rome, Italy

SALZBURG FESTIVAL
MORTON FELDMAN
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
CHARLES IVES
ROBERT SCHUMANN
SALZBURG
AUSTRIA
ITALY
CHAMBER MUSIC
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