SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Other Links

Editorial Board

Google Site Search

Aldeburgh Festival (3): Ligeti, Barry, Kurtág, Adès Natalia Zagorinskaia (soprano), Katalin Károlyi (mezzo), Stephen Richardson (bass), Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Thomas Adès, (conductor), The Maltings, Snape, Aldeburgh. 15. 6.2008 (AO)


Following on from the opening concert on Saturday, this was another evening of vivacious musical games and invention.  It was also a valedictory fro Thomas Adès, the current Director of the Aldeburgh Festival, and also a long term director of BCMG.  He has conducted and Ligeti many times, for their music has been a formative influence on his own.

There can be few livelier starts to an evening than Ligeti’s Sippal, Dobbal, Nadihegeduvel or With Pipes, Drums and Reed Fiddle. It’s scored for an odd combination of wind and percussion instruments, including slide whistles, ocarinas, tin pipes and massive kettledrums.  The set is based on poems by Sándor Weöres, whose anarchic, whimsical poems aren’t well known outside Hungary because they are almost untranslatable. Weöres plays games with the sound of words like a composer plays with abstract sound. Unless your Hungarian is fluent, you’ll probably miss out on some of puns and wordplays.  His idiom is sometimes described as “Hungarian Chinese”, for he was a linguist, travelling extensively in Asia during the 1930’s.  One of the songs, “Chinese Temple” is actually set out in rigid one word patterns, like Chinese poetry where form influences mood, This gives his writings a wonderfully imaginative feel, so even if you can’t understand a word, you pick up on the spirit it communicates.  The music is wonderfully liberating and inventive, breaking past musical form, just as the poet breaks past syntax and grammar.  The vocal line, too, goes beyond singing.  Zagorinskaia growls and shrieks, then intones lovely notes of perfect pitch. At times you can imagine she’s telling a story, for the sounds she makes equate with emotions like anger, nostalgia, gentleness and pure hilarious fun.  Each poem is short, but apposite, deftly written and precisely performed.

Similarly epigrammatic are Kurtág’s Poslania pokoinoi R V Troussova, or Messages of the late Miss RV Troussova.  These songs made Kurtág’s name as a composer. There are 21 songs in this group, some lasting no more than a few seconds, yet they explode as a series of short, sharp shocks. There’s no mistaking the intensity of feeling behind them. The poems are as intense as haiku, many of the spanning only three lines and less than 20 syllables.  “In you I seek my salvation”, goes one “but I find my fall”.  Or, towards the end, “Without you, I am like that woman in the bath house, with her breast cut off”.  The poems are by the Russian Rimma Dalos, who lived in Budapest.  She also quotes Anna Akhmatova and Goethe.  Similarly, Kurtág quotes Pierre Lunaire.  Aphoristic as these fragments are, they cover a panorama of feelings, which Kurtág replicates in scoring of intense detail. The cimbalom features prominently, its mysterious sound at once familiar and elusive.  Sometimes, the singer Katalin Károlyi uses throat voice in a peculiar rasping way that evokes archaic singing styles in remote parts of central Asia.  Kurtág’s settings are minimalist, using extreme economy to express vast expanses of feeling, sometimes too horrific to elaborate.

Gerald Barry’s new work Beethoven is also based on fragments, in this case of three letters written by Beethoven to his Immortal Beloved. Again there are quotes, such as the tune now known as “O Come, all ye faithful”, but after the highly concentrated, concise epigrams of Ligeti and Kurtág, the piece wasn’t heard to advantage.

Perhaps the lightness of touch and free spirit of Adès’s Living Toys might have helped.  This is an early work, clearly showing how Adès has absorbed and assimilated what he’s learned from Ligeti and Kurtág.  It is a vivacious 8 part sequence where images flit past like dreams, recurring and disintegrating as soon as they appear, as if in perpetual motion.  It’s witty, sparkling with effervescent humour, and is, unsurprisingly, one of the most popular pieces in Adès output.  It succeeds because it’s succinct. Played with the liveliness of the BCMG, it was an excellent end to an evening of invention.

Anne Ozorio


Back to Top                                                    Cumulative Index Page