patrikpen: Household Rituals in Music and Vision 3 agosto

sabato 14 settembre 2013

Household Rituals in Music and Vision 3 agosto

Household Rituals

Contemporary and modern music at Aix-en-Provence,
heard by GIUSEPPE PENNISI

The Aix Festival gives priority to lyric opera and includes a modern opera every year, possibly a new commission. As indicated in my previous article [Different Women, 30 July 2013], the festival also offers symphonic and chamber music. During my recent stay in Provence, I tried to give a theme to my selection from the vast menu being offered. Thus, I focused on contemporary and modern music, and in particular on the opera commissioned this year from a young Portuguese composer, Vasco Mendonça, and on a concert of the Quatuor Béla (Bela Quartet) featuring twentieth century composers as well on a concert of four different quartets. Two by two, they played octets and juxtaposed two world premieres of Aix commissions (from composers Mauro Lanza and Laurent Durupt) with two octets composed by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy when he was sixteen and Dmitri Shostakovich when he was nineteen. Also the works played by Quatuor Béla had been written when the composers were relatively young: ie Erwin Schulhoff was twenty-nine, Béla Bartók was forty-six and György Ligeti was thirty. Thus, the leitmotiv was youth, and modern and contemporary music.

Let us start with the opera -- The House Taken Over, title and libretto in English even though it is based on a short Argentinian novel Casa Tomada of the nineteen forties by Julio Cortázar. I saw the 11 July 2013 performance in the open air theatre Grand St Jean, a rural manor some ten kilometers from Aix. The work is a chamber opera, requiring a twelve member ensemble (Asko/Schönberg Ensemble, conducted by Etienne Siebens), a baritone (Oliver Dunn) and a mezzo (Kitty Whately). Also, the stage director, Katie Mitchell, and the set and costume designers are British (sets by Alex Eales, costumes by John Bright). Thus the overall atmosphere was British, indeed British lower middle class. This seemed to strike with the basic tenet of the short novel: a drama of pathological loneliness in an Argentine upper class family where brother and sister, left alone in the family mansion, have built their daily lives on household rituals (ie having breakfast and lunch at a given time, cleaning each piece of furniture manically) in memory of their forefathers. Gradually, noises in the house give them the feeling that the dwelling is being 'taken over' by other people. Thus, they live, and perform their daily rituals, in an ever smaller space. Until, they decide to call it quits and leave the house.

Kitty Whately as the Sister and Oliver Dun as the Brother in 'The House Taken Over' at Aix-en-provence. Photo © 2013 Patrick Berger

Briefly, it is an analysis of a pathology which in the short novel (where the plot is told by the brother) works better than in a play form. Musically, the orchestration is accurate and imaginative (especially the use of percussion). The vocal part is mostly declamation with some arioso.

Altogether, I found the chamber opera less convincing than world premieres by Oscar Strasnoy, Pascal Dusapin, Oscar Bianchi, Philippe Boesmans and George Benjamin heard in Aix during the last few years.

The Quatuor Béla concert (heard on 8 July 2013) was especially enthralling. Its setting was a former concentration camp which had been operating from 1939 to 1945 and where many men, women and children were imprisoned before being sent to their deaths in Germany and Poland. The compositions were quartets by composers who had fought against absolutism. Schulhoff's Five Pieces for String Quartet were written in 1927 in what is generally known the 'second Viennese style': they are largely based on joyful popular dances and, of course, they sound tragic now because we know that the composer died in a German concentration camp.

Quatuor Béla at Aix-en-provence. Photo © 2013 Clement Vial

Bartók's String Quartet No 3 in C sharp minor Sz 85 is a lovely work, albeit quite conventional. Ligeti's Quartet No 1, Night Metamorphoses, echoes one of the last works of Richard Strauss. The young quartet, created in 2006, specializes in twentieth century music and was very warmly applauded; at the request of the audience, the quartet provided as an encore the third movement of Ligeti's String Quartet No 2 -- a real joy.

We finally come to the 13 July octets. As mentioned, the ensemble was made up from five quartets: Qvixote, Deixis, Tana, Anima and Jerusalem, with instrumentalists comparatively young and trained in the Académie Européenne de Musique.

One of the octets at Aix-en-provence. Photo © 2013 Vincent Beaume

Mendelssohn's Octet Op 20 and Shostakovich's Octet Op 11 both had the ingredients of what their composers would become later. Especially evident was Shostakovich's irony.

Members of one of the octets at Aix-en-provence. Photo © 2013 Vincent Beaume

Mauro Lanza's Der Kampf zwischen Karneval und Fasten is an imaginative description of a carnival. Laurent Durupt's Super8 is an homage to Giacinto Scelsi on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death.