Horner's Corner

I’ve been listening – live and on record – to the music of four composers in particular in the last couple of weeks:

Faure:  Requiem, chamber music, songs and solo piano; Mahler: Sixth Symphony; Berg: Violin Concerto; Britten: Peter Grimes.

Faure

I took rather full advantage of the ‘Finding Faure’   season at King’s Place, including the study day, so I was briefly ‘Faured-out’ at the end. But what a fascinating composer – known by most for one thing, the Requiem, which is only representative of him in certain subtle ways, and by some over played ‘salon’ favourites. His chamber music, solo piano and songs, some of which I knew already, all of which I’m now playing through and thinking about – is marvellous. What’s remarkable, to pick one thing out that strikes me as really fascinating is the way in which his music eschews the dramatic contrasts in favour of a music of meditative continuity. This tendency culminates in his one string quartet (1923) which seems to propose another kind of modernism to Schoenberg or Stravinsky. Late romanticism, if we must label it, but with a kind of new aesthetic, a new way of listening, akin perhaps to the new way of seeing we get in Monet’s (contemporary) late water lily paintings. Just as that painter was losing his sight, so Faure was losing his hearing: but on they both went.

In the quartet ‘nothing much happens’ unless you are wholly absorbed by the flow, the interweaving strands of musical thought, the surprising modulations… Get the recording by the Dante Quartet, or by the Quator Ebene.

Berg: Violin Concerto; Mahler: Symphony No. 6

Played by the Philharminia Orchestra, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen at the South Bank.

Violin Soloist: Christian Tetzlaff

The Berg was  gripping. We were in the front row, not ideally placed for balance etc, but about 6 feet from Tetzlaff, and that was quite remarkable. Twelve  tone it may be, but the piece is lyrical and massively communicative.

The Mahler -perhaps because, quite unfairly, I came to the live performance with ears educated by Boulez, Fischer et al., didn’t quite have the impact of the Berg. Perhaps the clown who let out a massive cough just before the hammerblow at the end of the last movement had something to do with that. Still, an impressive   performance by the EPS and the Phil – part of their Vienna, City of Dreams series. (highly recommended – if the zeitgeist demands consideration, it has to be Vienna from about 1900 to 1935: Klimt, Schiele, Wittgenstein, Mach, Schoenberg, Freud, Kraus…etc etc .).

Thanks to all this, I am gripped by  the sixth in a way I never have been before.  As Julian Johnson said in his illuminating pre concert talk, it’s not clear how one enjoys a piece with the ‘tragic’ epithet. Rather in the way one ‘enjoys’ Oedipus Rex or King Lear, I suppose.Whether or not the symphony is best thought of in biographical terms, or as an expression of the new age of angst and war, its an unforgettable experience when its played well, as it was at the South Bank last week.

Britten: Peter Grimes (ENO) – cond. Edward Gardner, Directed by David Alden.

If you had asked me which composer I was immune to, I’d have said Britten. No more! This was a great production of what I’ve very belatedly come to see as a great opera. John Daszak was a very satisfying Grimes – not that I’ve anyone but the recording of John Vickers in the role to compare him with; the staging was (mostly) imaginative and the singing and playing throughout was always accomplished, and often quite spectacular. I’m won over.  A Grimes for our times?

 

 

Moholy Nagy:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Andre Kertesz: