Britten, Kurtàg, Liszt, Wagner, Schumann: Ian Bostridge (tenor), Thomas Adės (piano), Jerwood Hall, St Lukes, London 03.04.2007 (AO)

 

Friedrich Hölderlin died 200 years ago, in the tower at Tübingen to which he had been confined because he was mentally ill.  His poetry revolves around images of ancient Greece.  So why has he had such a compelling effect on composers of the mid and late 20^th century ?  Perhaps it’s because Hölderlin expresses his ideas in an unworldly, transcendental way that relates to modern sensibilities.  There can, and have been, whole studies devoted to Hölderlin’s effect on contemporary music, but tonight, we heard two very good settings.

The poet inspired one of Benjamin Britten’s most innovative works, the Sechs Hölderlin-Fragmente. For me, this cycle is one of Britten’s finest, but it is experimental and unusually demanding.  Its complex changes of rhythm, subtly shaped by pauses and shifts of mood  require exceptional interpretative insight.   If the songs are not better known, it’s because they don’t often get the performances they deserve:  so much depends on the intelligence of the interpretation.  Adės and Bostridge, however, are both highly intuitive Britten specialists, each deeply attuned to the quirkier, more complex levels in the music.  They have long been a team, at Aldeburgh and elsewhere, both sharing a feel for quixotic material.  Their recording of Janaček’s Diary of One Who Disappeared is one of my Desert Island Discs.

The key, I think, is to appreciate how acute Hölderlin’s vision really is.  In Menschenbeifall, the poet refers to mass opinion that only values as godlike , “Die allein, die es selber sind” -“Only they who themselves are gods”.  Britten sets a pause between each syllable, and a quietly probing piano commentary. Even trickier is Die Jugend, where the poet describes  being saved by a god from “the noise and bruises of mankind”, and taught love by “the songs of the whispering trees”. Perhaps the poet’s madness allowed him creative freedom outside conventional society?  After a dramatic pause mid-phrase, Bostridge has such feverish intensity that you know there’s something unnatural about the ecstasy.  Bizarre, leaping triplets in the piano line add to the effect.  With Die Linien des Lebens, the poet writes “Each line of life is different from another”, and the text  goes on, “what we are here is there by God completed with harmony, reward and peace eternal”. Perhaps.  But Britten indicates the darker side by pushing both voice and piano to their lowest extremes.   Bostridge observes the careful, measured deliberation of the final line, so it feels the poet is trying desperately to keep his real feelings under control, lest they break out in chaos and overturn the formal piety.  Adės plays sustained chords on the most extreme right of the keyboard, letting the sonority reverberate : long after the music has ostensibly ended, its sound resonates.  This was a masterfully compelling performance, reaching profoundly intuitive levels.  It is a loss to Britten, and indeed, to art, that Adės and Bostridge haven’t as yet, preserved their interpretation in recording.

After hearing Hölderlin, it was interesting to pick up on the contrasting undercurrents in Liszt’s Funerailles where the funeral march gave way to more lively melody.  It was followed by an excellent performance of three Kurtàg pieces, Tears, In Memory of a Just Man, and Postface á Zoltán Kocsis.  Just as Adės has an affinity to Britten, he has a close relationship to Kurtàg, who has had an influence on him as a composer, although their work is so very different.   In Memory of a Just Man the piano creates hollow, wooden sounds particularly well,: a funeral march of sorts, all the more moving because it’s so understated.   With Postface á Zoltán Kocsis, dark ostinato figures march once again, Adės punching them out with verve.

Behind the platform at Jerwood Hall are huge windows that reach almost to the ceiling.  As Adės began his solo pieces, these windows contributed  in a unique way to the atmosphere in the recital.  At this time of the year, sunset coincides with concert performances.  It was a brilliant backdrop to Wagner’s Liebestod, here in Liszt’s piano transcription.  As Adės played, sunset descended into twilight, and stars emerged in the night sky.  It probably wasn’t planned – no programme planner is that brilliant, surely – but it was an amazingly theatrical experience.

Stars and darkness also enhanced Kurtàg’s Friedrich Hölderlin : An…….It’s called that deliberately, because many of the poems come down to  us only as incomplete fragments.  The appeal to a miniaturist like Kurtàg is obvious.  He uses these tiny snatches of ideas to write pieces which depend on what is implied as well as what’s actually written.  Again, much depends on the ability of performers to interpret the inner musical logic and mood.  “Elysium” cries Bostridge.  This was Hölderlin’s visionary ideal world.  There’s no need for commentary.  The composer assumes the listener knows what Elysium symbolises and will think about it in the silence that follows the singer’s glorious outburst.  Again, the music replicates the gaps in the text, highlighting their importance.  The line  “singen möcht ich von dir” occurs twice – Kurtàg does repeats for a purpose, and Bostridge knows enough about the style to infuse the lines with intensity.  For this poet, creativity was life;  without his poetry he would truly have been extinguished.   It makes passionate, arching lines in other parts of the song even more poignant, for we get a glimpse of what might have been.  The poem ends with two disjointed fragments, “Klares Auge !” and “Himmlischer Geist !”.  Bostridge expresses these forcefully, for again, like “Elysium” they have a zen-like intensity.

The second half of the programme was a recital of Schumann’s Dichterliebe op 48.  Although it’s so famous, hearing it in the context of Hölderlin, Britten and Kurtàg was surprisingly stimulating.  Songs like Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet have always struck me as being oddly modern, because they capture an image of the sub-conscious, long before the concept was understood.  Moreover, in this song, Schumann uses jerky stops and starts to underline the strange, unreal world of dreams and suppressed anxiety.  There’s a long pause after the beautiful dream is described, and then, suddenly, baldly, comes “Ich wachte auf”, and another pause for effect.

Another thing that caught my attention in this performance was how Bostridge was singing, creating the timbre of an orchestral instrument as much as of a human voice.  It is very unusual and fascinating, because it adds another, deeper level to his performances.  Perhaps that’s another reason why his Caliban in Adės opera The Tempest was outstanding. His portrayal of the character was so well-rounded that it could almost deserve an opera of its own, exploring Caliban’s inner world.  Bostridge was outstanding, too, in his singing, even though the vocal parts throughout the opera are torturous and counter-intuitive to conventional singing.  However, when the parts are listened to as part of overall orchestral texture, the difficulties can be better understood.  Adės writes for voice as instrument, rather than voice per se, and it is singers who appreciate this who perform his music most effectively.

 

Anne Ozorio

 

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