United Kingdom JS Bach (arr. Berio), Alban Berg, Haydn and Claude Vivier: Veronika Eberle (violin), Aphrodite Patoulidou (soprano), London Symphony Orchestra / Barbara Hannigan (conductor). Barbican Hall, London, 2.3.2023. (CSa)
JS Bach (arr. Berio) – Contrapunctus XIX
Berg – Violin Concerto
Haydn – Symphony No.44, Trauer
Claude Vivier – Lonely Child
The Canadian singer and conductor Barbara Hannigan, a long-time collaborator and not too long ago appointed Associate with the London Symphony Orchestra, is described as an artist on the forefront of creation with a profound dedication to the music of our time. In addition to her extraordinary musicianship, she can also be an excellent innovator and an clever inventive planner, who brings seldom heard or beforehand unperformed up to date works to the eye of musicians and concertgoers alike, subtly connecting novel with extra acquainted items within the classical music repertoire. The advantage of Hannigan’s holistic method is that she breathes new mild into music making and attracts youthful and extra numerous audiences by enabling them to see and perceive present musical tendencies by means of the lens of historical past. Hannigan’s method was a lot in proof in her most up-to-date look with the orchestra in an imaginative live performance the place compositions spanning 4 centuries had been linked by widespread threads and united themes: grief, mourning and pleasure.
The live performance began with Bach’s 19 fugues recognized collectively as The Art of the Fugue, organized by Luciano Berio (and named Contrapunctus XIX). This set of fugues is taken into account to be the best and most endlessly creative of Bach’s works. Some, not least the composer’s son Carl Philipp Emmanuel, claimed that the final and unfinished fugue was dictated by the ailing composer from his sick mattress. They maintained that simply earlier than he died, he managed, within the last strains, to make use of musical notations equivalent to B-A-C-H to signal his title into the music. It was to be 250 years when in 2001, two years earlier than his personal loss of life, the Italian composer Berio tried to finish Bach’s interrupted contrapuntal journey, ending it in a mild and mysterious dissonance, its last vacation spot unknown. The piece is scored intimately for 23 gamers, and its execution requires exact coordination. In this efficiency, nonetheless, whereas the decreased and really uncovered forces of the LSO performed with haunting magnificence, they started uncertainly and finally didn’t carry the taut counterpoint exchanges between the devices, particularly woodwind and brass. These are essential to delineate the work’s continuously evolving panorama. This absence of definition and drive might have been the results of Hannigan’s course which, for all its bodily vitality – sweeping arm gestures, bending knees, beseeching palms and flicks of the wrist – lacked focus, seeming to counsel that the conductor was responding to the gamers’ interpretation of the music, relatively than the gamers to hers.
Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto ended the primary half. Completed in July 1935, simply eight months earlier than his loss of life, Berg determined to combine his mentor Schoenberg’s twelve-tone approach into an accessible and emotionally expressive memorial to his adored Manon Gropius, the not too long ago deceased 18-year-old daughter of Gustav Mahler’s widow Alma Mahler and the architect Walter Gropius. Writing to Alma on the time, Berg promised that ‘before this terrible year has passed, you … will be able to hear, in the form of a score which I shall dedicate “to the memory of an angel”, that which I feel today but cannot express.’ Like Bach, Berg’s work is a contemplation of mortality, and like Bach, Berg’s rating is monogrammed into the music. Indeed, Berg particularly references Bach’s mighty Lutheran chorale Es ist genug! Herr wenn es Dir gefällt within the concerto’s last motion Adagio. The soloist, acclaimed German violinist Veronika Eberle, performed with beguiling richness and wonder, and each she and the orchestra succeeded brilliantly collectively in reconciling the work’s competing calls for. Passages of angular 12 tonal modernity had been suffused with luxuriant romanticism, and the concerto’s intense moments of grief and mourning had been swiftly adopted by intervals of pleasure.
The similar musical leitmotifs additionally wove their approach into the second half of the live performance, with Haydn’s Symphony No.44, which he nicknamed Trauer (Mourning), as a result of in later life he requested that the light, sleek third motion Adagio be performed at his funeral. Written throughout Haydn’s experimental Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) interval, the symphony explored a brand new and extra expressive soundworld, introducing components of hysteria and dramatic shifts of temper. These had been totally realised in a efficiency of wealthy emotional contrasts and taut ensemble enjoying.
‘Bel enfant de la lumière dors, dors, dors, toujours dors’ (‘Beauteous child of light sleep, sleep, sleep, forever sleep’) are the primary phrases of textual content in Claude Vivier’s Lonely Child, a ‘long song of solitude’, and the programme’s last cease in a captivating journey of discovery. Vivier, a Canadian composer, grew up as an orphan. He was tragically murdered in his Paris house on the age of 34, the sufferer of a homophobic assault. Commissioned in 1980, three years earlier than he was killed, Lonely Child incorporates far jap influences, a fragile and magical world hovering between life and loss of life. It is a deeply religious and mystical self-portrait – a reassurance to a baby of the everlasting hope of the afterlife – scored for soprano and chamber orchestra. Barbara Hannigan’s luminous voice would have fitted the half completely, however she selected as a substitute to conduct from the podium. On this event, Hannigan’s orchestral management was excellent, producing from the gamers a dazzlingly colored and finely textured musical response, whereas the silver-voiced Aphrodite Patoulidou, ululated and declaimed her approach by means of the difficult solo half with supreme confidence.
Chris Sallon