Debussy: Nocturnes

Debussy's Nocturnes is this composer's opus I likely know best. Despite having listened to it quite often over the years it has always remained a bit of a closed book to me. It's beautiful music, of course, and quite easy and pleasant to listen too. But I have never found it to really catch fire. Again, as with Jeux, it's more a matter of intellectual admiration rather than genuine enthusiasm. I think it also very difficult to pull off well as an orchestra. For the most part it is not spectacular music and top soloists (particularly in the winds) are needed to breathe life in the sparse textures. I'd love to hear a version by the Budapest Festival Orchestra who have the delicacy and strength to do something extraordinary with it. But that recording does not exist.

I listened to a couple of versions. First a very dull reading by the Los Angeles Philarmonic led by Salonen. The muffled (20-bit) recording (from Royce Hall, UCLA) did nothing to enliven an experience of stifling boredom.

Then Abbado on a beautiful single LP (in a separate box) with the Boston SO. I gave this LP a cursory listen when it came back from the KM treatment and was very much taken by the beautiful, very spacious recording. But now it struck me as being much too airy, dissolving a lot of the orchestral detail in the surrounding ambience. I compared with the corresponding version on CD which has been significantly reengineered and sounds very dry and boxy.

Another reading by Abbado can be accessed via the Berlin PO's Digital Concert Hall (striking, by the way, how very little music by Debussy has been played during the last seasons). It's a concert from 1998, when Abbado was still the orchestra's chief conductor, in the rather curious surroundings of the VASA museum in Stockholm (with the noble warship looming above the orchestra). How quaint and nerdy the Berliners looked in those days! Not a bad reading but, again, not something that gave me goosepimples.

The best experience, as could be expected, was the lauded performance by Haitink and the Concertgebouw Orchestra. This double CD with all the key orchestral works is justly regarded as a cornerstone of the Debussy discography. The sophistication of the orchestral playing is matched by a super-smooth and silky recording. And even there I remain a rather dispassionate listener.

It may well be that I will never be a genuine Debussyan. It's not an accident that it's precisely his late work that leads me to explore his work in more depth. Because a Debussy 'sonata' is, in a way, an oxymoron. His greatness lies precisely in his resistance to these conflict-driven formal templates from the past. Debussy is not a symphonist and most consciously did not want to be constrained by these forms. Instead he did not go down the path of expressionistic fragmentation but relied on a compositional strategy of 'transformational networks' "which treat the musical material as a mixture of motivic and harmonic components in a logically evolving rather than a stratified context" (Arnold Whittal quoting David Lewin in his contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Debussy). Instead of 'logically evolving' it would perhaps be better to talk about 'organically evolving' as formally and harmonically the music charts a process in which continuity and change interact. Eliott Carter spoke of "coherent, ever changing continuities". Another revealing quote from the same article, this time Whittal quoting Robert P. Morgan: "the music never degenerates into a series of pleasant yet unrelated effects, a succession of isolated musical moments; everything is held together by a tight network of melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic associations ... (nevertheless) the type of musical form he developed is more loosely connected and more 'permeable' ... than that of traditional tonal music. His conception of form as essentially 'open' in character was to have an important influence on much later twentieth-century music". In a way it's reassuring that up to this day also skilled music analysts can't find a satisfactory algorithm to decode Debussy's music. Maybe we need to convince complexity theorists and agent-based modellers to have a look, as these are scientists used to let complex, organic structures flower from modest cells. 

C.P.E. Bach - Sinfonias

A fun excursion into the pre-classical repertoire with the music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. I listened four or five times to the Sinfonia Wq 183.3 performed by the Berlin Philharmonic under Antonini. It's an intriguing piece, sounding surprisingly modern because of its adventurous harmonic language and gestural unpredictability. The Berliner do it really well.

I have a Philips LP with 4 other sinfonias, performed by the English Chamber Orchestra led by Raymond Leppard at the cembalo. This must be early 1970s stuff. Not all of them are equally interesting. The first movement of the Wq 177 has something of the same daring and furor as the Wq 183.3. Wq 182.5 jumps out too. In the first movement CPE makes some really weird harmonic excursions. Its Larghetto is quite seductive as well. The finale has a striking menacing and aggressive quality.

It's somewhat of a mysterious figure, this C.P.E. Bach. Nowadays his discography seems to be quite scattered. Not quite clear where to start. But in his time he was very well regarded and infuential. Mozart referred to him as 'our father'. Beethoven also paid him respect. Stylistically he has been torn between the contrapuntal approach of his father and the more cultured, homophonic style of Italian opera fashionable in his day. His sinfonias distinguish themselves by their rhapsodic forms and offbeat, sometime avant garde solutions. It seems to me today C.P.E. would make an excellent composer of film music.

Beethoven: Symphony nr. 2 - CPE Bach: Sinfonia

Following upon the audition of Giovanni Antonini's take on Beethoven's Seventh, I was intrigued to find him back in similar repertoire in the Berliner Philharmoniker's Digital Concert Hall. An interesting programme featuring an orchestral suite by Bach, a sinfonia by CPE Bach and Beethoven 2. I didn't listen to the Bach suite, but took the sinfonia as a delightfully vivid aperitif. There's a waywardness in the piece that is quite attractive. This composer merits more of my attention. Antonini's approach to the Beethoven is fully in line with the reading captured by the Klara live recording: clearly etched, dynamic, hard driven. As with the CD, I listened with considerable pleasure. And it is great to see a slimmed down Berliner digging so impassionately into the music. It's really a living, pulsating organism, not a bureaucracy that is making music there. In one way or another they are always able to create a genuine sense of occasion. On the other hand, I wonder to what extent we can really talk of an 'interpretation' here given that Antonini had at the most a single rehearsal to work with the orchestra through the symphony (I learned that from the accompanying interview). Reminds me about Berganza's remark on the quality of the music making being better 40 years ago when orchestras and singers still had several weeks to prepare an opera production. Eventually you end up with quite extraordinary situations such as the one documented on a video here where Maria Joao Pires discovers during a live concert at the Concertgebouw that she has prepared the wrong Mozart concerto. Clearly, rehearsal was not deemed necessary at all!

Anyway I certainly enjoyed this Beethoven Second. As with the Seventh I sometimes wondered whether it is really necessary to drive the orchestra to the point of near-paroxysm. There are a few shots where you can witness the amazing dexterity of the double bass players working themselves at breakneck speed through the score. Inevitably, the sound thickens and becomes less 'beautiful'. Antonini tells in the interview this is quite justified. Beauty of sound does not have to respected at all times, he thinks (referring to Karajan as someone who upheld the opposite paradigm). Sometimes the orchestra is allowed to sound ugly, as long as the unpleasantness serves the spirit of the music. Hmmm, maybe.

This week I was driving (rather lurching) with the car towards Brussels and exceptionally I had the radio on. There was the opening movement of Beethoven's Fourth. It was amazing. The orchestra sounded like a period band. What was remarkable was the beautiful ebb and flow that breathed through the music. And the effortless suppleness with which the lines where shaped. I was surprised (and yet I wasn't!) to hear about the performers: Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra. Now that seemed like great Beethoven ...

Shostakovich: Chamber Symphony - Takemitsu: Requiem for Strings - Tchaikovsky: Symphony nr. 6

Another week without serious listening went by. Several reasons for that. Submitted my thesis on Monday and then had to throw myself headlong in three project that are running in parallel. So little time. Further, I am still exploring this whole streaming concept so I am reading up on it as much as I can, whilst trying out snippets here and there. With this, my interest in the audiophile side of the listening has again reared its ugly head, so I have been sampling a few things purely for comparative purposes. And, finally, I haven't settled down yet on what I would like to in the next few weeks. Shall I continue with the Bartok project which is still incomplete? What about the stack of string quartets that is waiting for me? Or maybe it is a better idea to relax and just hop between genres until I feel the gravitational pull from something or other?

Anyway, I do need to catch up on a few things I did listen to in the past few weeks. From the BP Digital Concert Hall I have not heard a lot yet. In fact I have limited myself to just one concert. A rather odd affair as it was a memorial concert on the occasion of 25 years Chernobyl (April 26, 1986) that brought together several ensembles in the Berliner Philharmonie: the strings of the Berlin Philharmonic, the Staatskapelle Berlin and a Ukrainian mixed chamber choir Credo.

The programme consisted of a long introductory part in which Shostakovich's Chamber Symphony op. 110a was played by the strings of the BPO, altercating with three pieces for choir, and then also texts declamated by two readers (Therese Affolter and Christian Brückner). The whole thing had a theatrical aspect with the strings arranged in a semi-circle (without conductor), backed by the speakers and choir. Despite the unconventional setup it was a gripping performance. The Chamber Symphony was brought with appropriate gravitas without sounding morose, the choir pieces were heartstoppingly beautiful and ravishingly sung and the speakers did quite well (particularly Affolter stood out).

After the break it was the Staatskapelle's turn, conducted by Andrei Boreyko. Allegedly it was his debut performance with the orchestra. I have one Boreyko CD in my collection: Schnittke's Faust Cantata complemented by Bach pieces (with the Hamburg Philharmonic, on Berlin Classics). He is known for enterprising programming. (Soon we will be able to hear more of that as the Belgian National Orchestra have been able to lure him as chief conductor from the 2012-13 season onwards. Next year, in April, he will make his Bozar debut. With Boreyko in Brussels and De Waart and Herreweghe in Antwerp it seems our orchestras are finally getting serious.) First there was a brief but beautiful piece, unbeknownst to me: the Requiem for Strings by Takemitsu. Up to this day I haven't quite fallen for Takemitsu's music which sounds like a somewhat diluted impressionism to me. But this early piece (1957) is very striking, almost Bartokian in the dark suppleness of its long lines. It put the young Japanese composer immediately on the map when it was (accidentally) auditioned by Stravinsky during one his visits to Tokyo. I thought the performance by the Staatskapelle was quite successful.

The concert was brought to a close by Tchaikovsky's "Pathétique". I was rather less impressed by this reading which didn't seem to plumb the depths of some of the others I know. Altogether a very unusual but well received concert on the DCH.