A Double Experiment in Music and Vision 8 Settembre

A Double Experiment
Avant-garde and late romanticism
at La Sagra Malatestiana,
by GIUSEPPE PENNISI

As I wrote here on 4 September 2010, both in Italy and abroad, Rimini is generally known as a beach resort on the Adriatic Coast. It is very crowded with happy-go-lucky youngsters during the summer months. There are amusement 'theme parks' for young people of all ages, dancing night clubs and the like. In the autumn, it is one of the preferred spots for the retirees; prices are lower, the climate is mild, the sky and sea are blue and there are many bridge clubs.
Few music lovers are aware that Rimini is also the location of one the most interesting music festivals, called 'Sagra Musicale Malatestiana' after the Malatesta family which in the Renaissance ruled the city and the surrounding areas and built some interesting monuments. The 'Sagra Musicale' is at its 62nd edition; it is financed nearly entirely by local sponsors; in 2011 it lasts from 3 August until well into the autumn.
It is divided into four parts: four Bach concerts in precious Renaissance churches, five symphony concerts entrusted to internationally known orchestras, each with a local sponsor (Orchestra Nazionale della Rai with Orchestra of Teatro Regio di Torino, St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, National Santa Cecilia Orchestra and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra) under very well-known conductors (Gianandrea Noseda, Yuri Temirkanov, Juraj Valcuha, Antonio Pappano and Zubin Mehta), a number of concerts by young conductors featuring scores by Rimini composers, and a series of Sunday morning chamber music concerts.
Also, with the aim of attracting new and younger audiences to classical music, several sponsors subsidize tickets to students as a part of a cohesive project and a special August program marries modern popular or even pop music with 'high' music. A final point: since 2005, between the Bach and the symphony section, a real jewel: the world première of a chamber opera in a small theatre built within the ruins of an Augustinian monastery. The chamber opera is normally made up from music not originally intended for dramatic action on stage, and the production has a very low budget. Indeed, often it should be called 'micro-opera' as it requires few performers in the orchestra and only one or two singers.

Leonardo Delogu as the poet in 'La mort de Virgile'. Photo © 2011 Fabiana Rossi. Click on the image for higher resolution
This review focuses on the 2011 chamber opera (Barraqué's La mort de Virgile) and the first mammoth concert -- Mahler's 8th Symphony, normally named The Symphony of a Thousand because at its premiere in Munich under the baton of the composer it required 1030 performers in the orchestra, choruses and children's chorus. This time, it is a joint effort of the orchestras and choruses of three major institutions: the RAI National Orchestra, the Turin Teatro Regio and the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, with a major set of soloists. I heard La mort de Virgile on 4 September and The Symphony of a Thousand on 5 September 2011. Under the same baton and with same orchestras, choruses and soloists, the symphony had been played on 3 September in Turin in the oversized Lingotto Auditorium. Also, on 22, 23 and 24 October, The Symphony of a Thousand will inaugurate the 2011-2012 season of the Orchestra Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, under the baton of Antonio Pappano and with a choral part assisted by the China National Chorus.
Before reviewing the chamber opera, it is worth remembering that this year especially, two concerts of the Bach section have been deemed outstanding: Harmony of the Spheres on 11 August and Ensemble Aglàia on 21 August 2011. This is worthy of notice because in Italy, Bach is not as popular or as frequently performed as in the German or Anglo-Saxon worlds.
This year the chamber opera involved a double experiment: to marry an unfinished avant-garde composition of the 1960s with the staging by a well-known avant-garde local theatre company (Teatro Valdoca) and played by an avant-garde Italian percussion group (Ensemble Pleiadi), a soprano specializing in modern music (Sara Gamarro) and a pianist (Francesco Libetta) acting also as conductor. Thus, double or quadruple avant-garde.

Francesco Libetta at the piano with Ensemble Pleiadi. Photo © 2011 Fabiana Rossi. Click on the image for higher resolution
Jean Barraqué is very little known outside the comparatively small world of the specialists of late twentieth century music. He kept outside of the two fighting 'schools' (Darmstadt and IRCAM), he died comparatively young and his compositions are hard to perform because of the huge means they require. Indeed, in Rimini, only a small fragment of the oversized yet unfinished La mort de Virgile was performed -- the part called Chant après Chant -- by Barraqué himself. The whole project is based on the 545 page novel by Hermann Broch describing the last eighteen hours of the poet who wants to burn his major poem (and the rest of his work) before dying. The writing of the novel took twenty years and it's not a light read.

Leonardo Delogu as the poet and Muna Mussie as Lisania in 'La mort de Virgile'. Photo © 2011 Fabiana Rossi. Click on the image for higher resolution
In Chant après Chant we see, at the front of the stage, the poet (Leornardo Delogu) dying with the assistance of his preferred young boy, Lisania (Muna Mussie); on the rest of the stage, six percussion groups, a pianist and a soprano evocate how death is a big and deep dream. Some critics felt that the integration between the dramaturgical part and the musical part left much to be desired. On the contrary, at the 4 September 2011 performance, I felt that both depicted the desperate world of Barraqué and Broch well. My main concern is that an event like this is likely to be really unique because of the complexities it entails for a forty-five minute performance.

Muna Mussie as Lisania in 'La mort de Virgile'. Photo © 2011 Fabiana Rossi. Click on the image for higher resolution
From the avant-garde of the avant-garde, let's move to The Symphony of a Thousand, rarely heard live. In Italy I remember only two live performances at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna; in both instances, there were no more than three hundred performers. In Washington, where I lived for fifteen years, I recall two performances in the enormous National Cathedral with the chorus in the upper lodges and grandiose stereophonic effects. No doubt, it is one of Mahler's most intriguing symphonies. It is made up of two parts: a late Romantic adaption of the chorus Veni Creator (composed by the Mainz Archbishop in 850 or earlier) and the final scene of Goethe's Faust. In 1980, Michael Steinberg published documents showing how Mahler was attracted by the second part of Faust, especially by the relationship between the protagonist and Helen of Troy, an episode, however, ignored in the final version.
From the musical standpoint, the very concise choral first part is juxtaposed with an expanded and very dramatic second part for a total duration of about eighty minutes. The second part is made up of individual short scenes connected by leitmotif; in the finale, the ascending theme of Veni Creator is back in a fortissimo with full orchestra, double chorus and most soloists in an exploding E Flat of the last words Das Ewig Weibliche/Zieht uns hinan.
The conceptual aspects are rather complex: Mahler was a non-believing Jew but officially converted to the Roman Catholic Church with a very publicized baptism. Many scholars maintain that such a conversion was an opportunist manner to become director of the Vienna Opera. Yet The Symphony of a Thousand is quite religious and was conceived when intrigues in the Opera corridors drove to his ousting and to the worsening of his heart condition. In my view, Mahler moved from a pantheistic (especially in the Third Symphony) to a Zen view (most significantly in Das Lied von der Erde) and his Catholicism (and The Symphony of a Thousand) were part of this path.
There is a variety of ways to approach The Symphony of a Thousand: Claudio Abbado has his philosophy in print, Georg Solti has a delicate nearly chamber music touch, Seiji Ozawa is full of fire. Gianandrea Noseda (as well as Pappano) has a long experience of music theatre. Thus 'his' Symphony of a Thousand is a highly dramatic melodrama. There is a strong justification for this: the text of the second part is full of scenic details -- so many that I often wondered why, to the best of my knowledge, it has never attracted opera houses for an expensive but enthralling fully staged production. Noseda's baton is swift but it slows the tempos when this accentuates the dramatic impact. The choruses were excellent and well amalgamated, albeit their different origins.

Gianandrea Noseda directing the Orchestra and Chorus of Teatro Regio in Verdi's Requiem. Photo © Ramella & Giannese. Click on the image for higher resolution
However, neither the Lingotto in Turin nor the Palazzo dei Congressi in Rimini (where I heard the performance) have the acoustics required for the Mahler score. This penalized the singers; furthermore, Noseda did not place them right at the front of the stage but in different parts of the huge orchestra. Also some replacement in the women soloists' group had to be made just on the eve of the performance. Comments on individual soloists would not be fair to the overall conditions. Detlef Roth (Pater Ecstaticus) and Julia Kleiter (in the short part of Mater Gloriosa) excelled. Stephen Gould was a good but somewhat strained Doctor Marianus. Christof Fischesser (Pater Profundis), Erica Smmergärd (Magna Peccatrix), Bernarda Bobro (Mulier Samaritana), Elena Pankratova (A Repented Woman) and Maria Radner (Maria Aegyptiaca) all kept the good average standards of Nordic theatre and concert hall.

Gianandrea Noseda. Photo © Sussie Ahlburg. Click on the image for higher resolution
Nonetheless, the audience did not seem to feel these subtleties. Ovations to all and accolades for Noseda.
Copyright © 8 September 2011 Giuseppe Pennisi,
Rome, Italy

GUSTAV MAHLER
ITALY
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