Bridging the 48th Parallel: Music of Central Europe  Gerard Schwarz, cond., soloists, ensembles, Seattle Symphony Chorale, Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 31.5-9.6.2007 (BJ)

If you are searching for patterns in the history of 20th-century music, and prefer to look beyond obvious stylistic phenomena like neo-classicism, late-romanticism, and the influence of jazz, or such technical innovations as the 12-note method, total serialism, and aleatory techniques, perhaps the most striking development that will come to mind is the substantial shift in the balance of creative power among the various countries of Europe. Through most of the baroque, classical, and romantic periods, Germany, Austria, France, and Italy constituted the creative center, augmented to some degree in the 19th century by Russia and Czechoslovakia–whose stylistic affinities were also respectively French and Austro-German. Poland and Hungary, it is true, produced Chopin and Liszt; but again, those two masters concentrated their activities in France and Germany.

In the 20th century, however, countries that had previously been on the periphery bred one significant composer after another, with the result that their musical life took on a newly central position in the European spectrum, and instead of remaining content to be influenced by the western-European “big four” nations, they began to export their own influence in the opposite direction. It is certainly arguable that such festivals as the Warsaw Autumn and the Prague Spring have had a more lasting, and a healthier, effect on composition in the west than the more recherché explorations of Darmstadt, Metz, or Baden-Baden. And besides Prokofiev and Shostakovich, and several Nordic and English composers, any reasonable list of substantial and influential 20th-century European figures in the field would surely have to include the Hungarians Bartók, Kodály, Ligeti, and Kurtág, the Czechs Janáček and Martinů, the Romanian Enescu, and a considerable number of Poles, among them Lutoslawski, Panufnik, Penderecki, and Górecki.

With the exception of the two last named, every one of the composers in those four national groups was represented in the festival Gerard Schwarz had devised for his Seattle Symphony this spring. The title referred to the rough correspondence between the latitude of several central and eastern European capitals and that of Seattle itself. Appropriately, the festival began with an evening focused on Bartók and ended with Janáček , but practically every important creative strand in the region was explored in between, not only by the full orchestra, but by solo performers and ensembles of various sizes, supplemented by a weekend of Community Celebration events ranging through Hungarian folk dance, Polish choral singing, Balkan cabaret, and pan-Slavonic folk song and dance.

Preceded by one of Martinů's finest works, the Double Concerto for two string orchestras, piano, and timpani, Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle got the festivities off to a suitably spectacular start. Beginning with a dramatic delivery of the original Hungarian prologue by Charles Simonyi–software engineer, patron of the arts, and recent space-traveler, the composer’s only opera was presented on 31 May and 2 June in a “concert-staged” version. What this meant was that the two singers executed some stage movements (planned by consultant Sharon Ott and Schwarz himself) at the front of the stage, with atmospheric lighting designed by Jeff Lincoln, while the orchestra played behind a monumental set of six glass artworks created by Dale Chihuly, the world’s most celebrated glass artist. As the time came for each of the first six doors in Bluebeard’s castle to be opened, these 20-foot-high towers, blank on their front surfaces, revolved to reveal Chihuly’s magically beautiful evocations of the vistas, from torture-chamber to lake of tears, that lay beyond them. In combination with splendid singing from Sally Burgess and Charles Robert Austin, and a thrilling account of the score from the orchestra, the effect was indeed awesome. Béla Balázs’s libretto being a classic symbolist text, it was especially fitting and illuminating that Chihuly’s tableaux were themselves symbolic rather than merely literal representations, right down to the seventh door, whose total blankness made manifest the oblivion to which Judith’s rash insistence on delving into another person’s soul had now doomed her. The full accoutrements of a stage setting in the opera house might add a further dimension of theatrical complexity to the work, but in terms of the concert hall, this deeply considered and expertly realized vision seemed to me the last possible word in dramatic vividness and truth.

On 7 and 9 June, Janáček's Glagolitic Mass brought the festival to a majestic conclusion. This characteristically idiosyncratic score, a setting of the Old Church Slavonic text of the Mass calling for four vocal soloists, chorus, orchestra, and organ, drew from the Seattle Symphony instrumental sonorities that seemed to soar exultantly aloft, and the chorus, though not always fully in balance with the orchestra, did its part with enormous vitality and remarkably clear diction. Christine Goerke and Patrick Carfizzi projected the taxing soprano and bass solos heroically. The mezzo-soprano soloist, Sarah Heltzel, had to sit for nearly forty minutes to sing just a few notes, so any judgement of her quality must remain provisional, but she sounded fine. The tenor soloist in the work is called on to penetrate some pretty hectic orchestral textures, and in the louder passages that fine singer Gary Lakes seemed no longer to command the sheer heft of, say, the trumpet-tongued Beno Blachut in earlier performances of the work, but his arresting combination of Helden tone with something of the “thinking” quality I remember from Jon Vickers’s voice made his more lyrical phrases particularly eloquent. Joseph Adam, too, provided a telling contribution with a virtuoso rendering of the penultimate movement, an urgently rhetorical organ solo.

The first half of this program contained a five-movement work titled Verkündigung by the young Hungarian composer Levente Gyöngyösi and Karel Husa’s relatively familiar and expertly written Music for Prague. There was nothing actively disagreeable about Gyöngyösi’s piece, which takes its inspiration from poems by Rilke, but the effect was pedestrian and seriously lacking in forward motion.

Comparison with the equally new work that began the Friday 8 June concert was instructive. Kryštof Mařatka, born in Prague in 1972 and now living in Paris, wrote his Three Concertante Movements for cello and string orchestra a decade ago, while still in his early twenties. Yet there is nothing remotely inexperienced about this exhilarating work, which makes exorbitant demands on soloist and orchestra alike, but rewards both with a wealth of expressive material and with a fetching wit and lightness of touch rare in such relatively modernistic works. For this is, indeed, “Modern Music” in its avoidance of readily graspable melodic patterns and in its exploitation of elusive and at times almost ghostly sonorities. It is not the kind of music I usually warm to, and this made all the more impressive the fact that I enjoyed it immensely. The certainty, moreover, with which the composer knew where he was going, and also knew when he preferred the music for a while to stand still, threw light on precisely what had been missing from Gyöngyösi’s piece on the previous evening: a real command of movement.

Under the title “Composers Who Could Not Be Censored: Voices Unleashed,” the program Mařatka had begun emerged as one of the most satisfying in Schwarz’s whole brilliantly planned festival. Between Enescu’s chromatically involuted Chamber Symphony and Graóyna Bacewicz’s intricately propulsively Concerto for String Orchestra, he had had the fascinating idea of juxtaposing Andrzej Panufnik’s Autumn Music and Witold Lutos»awski’s Funeral Music. Both are memorial pieces–Panufnik’s for a friend dying of cancer at the time of its composition, Lutoslawski’s for Bartók–and both are among their composers’ strongest works, the Panufnik characteristically enchanting in its raptly hovering sonorities and profound feeling, the Lutoslawski more austere in tone and rigorous in structure yet also emotionally compelling. But the most interesting thing about their presence together was that each of them does something unusual in its own composer’s practice but familiar in the work of the other: Autumn Music includes Panufnik’s only experiment with two simultaneous but mutually independent tempos, one strict and the other free; and Funeral Music is one of the relatively few works, and was the last for some years, in which Lutoslawski does not employ aleatory freedom of rhythm.

None of this music could have had anything like the effect it did without the quite remarkable performing standards achieved by Schwarz and his forces. These included both fairly large chamber-orchestral complements and, in the Enescu, twelve solo players. It would be invidious to single out any individuals for special commendation–the command that players and conductor alike demonstrated in such copious and stylistically wide-ranging repertoire, performed within so short a space of time, was nothing short of amazing. Amazement was also the only possible response to a whole series of extraordinary performances by the Seattle Symphony’s 23-year-old principal cellist, Joshua Roman. His first star turn came on the Sunday afternoon, 3 June, with a solo recital that coupled dazzling readings of the unaccompanied sonatas of Ligeti and Kodály. The Kodály is, if I may say so, more of a circus act than a really satisfying musical experience, but to watch Roman dispatch its exorbitant combinations of bowed double-stops with left-hand pizzicatos on the other strings was thrilling. The Ligeti is the more profound composition of the two. It was played with comparable mastery and a throat-catching richness and solidity of tone, and again, I was delighted to find myself bowled over by a composer I don’t always enjoy. The work stands, I think, with the Horn Trio among Ligeti’s most compelling utterances, revealing a musical character far more sympathetic than such extravagances as Le Grand Macabre, which represent his other side in their attempt to épater the bourgeois.

With scarcely time for a breath after his solo tour de force, Roman returned just an hour later for a concert by various chamber ensembles and soloists that asked, “After Bartók: What’s Next?” Here he took part in a rather desultory Quartet to Christian Wolff for flute, clarinet, violin, and cello by Ádám Kondor, followed it with Peter Eötvös’s enjoyable Two Poems to Polly for speaking cello player, and then took over for the Seattle Chamber Players’ ailing cellist in the world premiere of Cascando, for soprano, flute, clarinet, violin, and cello, commissioned by the ensemble from the Polish composer Agata Zubel. (Roman was also the fleet-fingered soloist at the Friday concert in the Mařatka work, and played the cello part in the Enescu Chamber Symphony.) Zubel herself sang–if that is the right word–the soprano part in her new piece, and later in the program in Jan Kapr’s Cvi…eni pro Gydli. She executed a number of prodigious vocal manoeuvres–the kind of thing we used to associate with the great Cathy Berberian–with a brilliance and intensity of her own, but the music in both cases seemed to me without substance, and markedly less successful in its evident purpose than some pieces in similar vein written years ago by that neglected composer, the late Kenneth Gaburo. Suffering from something of a surfeit of novelties, I fled after only two movements of another world premiere, Brettl Trio for clarinet, violin, and piano by Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer. And yet again, it was a composer I don’t usually count among my favorites–György Kurtág–who supplied the real meat of the evening: a typically quirky but unusually (for me) beguiling set of pieces for clarinet, viola, and piano titled Hommage ŕ R. Sch. (in complete words, Robert Schumann).

Though I missed some of the festival’s community based events, as well as the showing of a filmed version of Ferenc Erkel’s opera Bánk Bán, I did enjoy the latter stages of a Balkan cabaret starring vocalist Mary Sherhart; a highly entertaining program by the Bokréta Hungarian Dance Ensemble, including some nifty dancing with filled bottles balanced on the dancers’ heads; and the pieces by Ivan Spassov and Georghi Arnaoudov that concluded a recital of Bulgarian piano music by Anna Levy (though the preceding Triumph of the Bells by Vasil Kazandzhiev was just a tired old assemblage of clichés from what I think of as the avant-derričre garde–clusters played with the forearm, plucked strings, the whole shooting-match). Towards the end of the week, a quite special charm attached to the appearance of the veteran Romanian-born pianist Lory Wallfisch, who prefaced the “Voices Unleashed” concert with a talk about “The Multi-Faceted Genius of George Enescu,” illustrating her remarks by playing, with a still highly serviceable technique, excerpts from the composer’s First Piano Sonata. She took a lively part too in the post-concert discussion, along with Dr. Pierre Loebel, who with his wife, Felice, sponsored the evening’s events, in honor of his grandfather, Sigmund Birman. Mr. Birman was a friend of Enescu’s, and his grandson regaled a receptive audience with some diverting tales about childhood encounters with the famous composer.

The last word of appreciation must go to Gerard Schwarz, for covering a vast amount of material with a thoroughness scarcely credible within the span of–can it have been just ten days? Next season he will be offering us a survey of the work of composers who moved from Europe to America. Watch this space. Or come to Seattle and enjoy it.

 

Bernard Jacobson