SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Henze, Holt, Hoddinott: BBC National Orchestra of Wales / Jac van Steen, Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff, 24.1.2009 (GPu)

Henze: Symphony No.8
Holt: Troubled Light
Hoddinott: Lizard


The second programme to be played at the new Hoddinott Hall was decidedly literary in its inspirations. Though entirely instrumental rather than vocal, musical allusions to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to Goethe, to poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Lorca and Gwyn Thomas abounded. There was an attractive unity of design to the programme, moving as it did from Henze’s evocation of the nocturnal world of Shakespeare’s comedy, set for the most part in a dark wood outside Athens, where the fairies “run / …  From the presence of the sun, / Following darkness like a dream” to “A wall in Provence, / And the warm sun of centuries / Yellow within it”, lines which open Gwyn Thomas’s poem ‘Lizard’, the text behind Alun Hoddinott’s work of the same name. The journey from Henze to Hoddinott took its route through Simon Holt’s ‘Troubled Light’, which takes its title from a phrase of Goethe’s, in definition of colour.

Henze’s Midsummer Night’s Dream symphony is in three movements, an opening Allegro and a closing Adagio sandwiching a movement marked ‘Ballabile’ (and how could any Midsummer Night’s Dream music not contain at least some passages suitable for dancing?). Each movement is a response to a particular episode in Shakespeare’s play. The first seeks to represent the fulfilment of Puck’s response, in Act II Scene 1, to Oberon’s command to fetch for him the flower known as ‘love-in-idleness’: “I’ll put a girdle round about the earth / In forty minutes”. The second movement represents the encounter between Titania and Bottom; the closing movement articulates the border between dream world and real world in the play’s epilogue.

In the first movement the music is dominated by a sense of insistent movement, a kind of perpetuum mobile, through a range of pitches high and low, and between sections of the orchestra. Tenaciously busy, the music is not without occasional hints of menace. Scored for double woodwind, a full complement of strings, tuba, timpani, harp, celesta, piano and five percussionists, this and subsequent movements make full use of the available instrumental resources. In the first movement textures are not lingered on in the haste of forward propulsion, but there are many that startle and interest. In music of considerable complexity (here and elsewhere on the programme) Jac van Steen’s control was exemplary and the playing of the orchestra of sustained high quality, at the service of the sense of magical speed and exhilarating scope inherent in the idea of Puck’s journey. In the second movement, the hints of menace were replaced by a certain humour, an amused tolerance of the absurdity of the relationship between the Fairy Queen and Bottom the weaver, evidence of Bottom’s own perception that “reason and love keep little company together nowadays” (as if it had ever been otherwise!). It was tempting to hear Bottom in the brass section (particularly in the prominent presence of the trombone) and of Titania in the string writing which, at times, comes close to a late romantic lushness, but that was perhaps too schematic a simplification. Certainly the sense of contrasting extremes, of ethereal and animalistic, of spirit and flesh, was everywhere to be heard in a fine movement, particularly well played. The most simply ‘beautiful’ music was to be heard in the closing adagio, which seemed to occupy the liminal territory where natural and supernatural, human and fairy worlds meet, or, to put it another way, that point of impending transition in which the theatre audience inhabits both the world of enchantment and the ‘real’ world to which it must soon return. Henze’s complex scoring here, especially for strings and woodwinds, was both exquisite and strong and there was a well judged sense of open-ended conclusion, insofar as material from the first two movements was partially recapitulated and reconciled, but there was no sense of absolute closure. This may not be the profoundest of Henze’s orchestral works, but it has distinctive qualities and it is not surprising that there should have been two recent recordings of the work; by the Gürzenich Orchester of Kön conducted by Markus Stenz (on Phoenix) and by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Marek Janowski (on Wergo). More than a few of those who heard this performance in the Hoddinott Hall will surely want to get hold of a recording and explore the work further. Jac van Steen’s was an assured and inviting reading of the work.

When Simon Holt’s Troubled Light was premiered at last summer’s Proms, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales was conducted by Thierry Fischer, rather than by Jac van Steen. Having been abroad at the time of the premiere I am unfortunately not in a position to make any comparisons. Where Newton had affirmed that bodies absorb light in accordance with their own pigmentation, Goethe argued that colour was produced by the interaction of light and dark and that colour should be thought of as “troubled light”. Holt’s musical response is in five movements; each of the first four has a single ‘colour’ at its centre; the fifth, and longest, movement gathers together and interweaves materials from its predecessors. The first section, “the fell of dark” takes its title from a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins, of which the octave reads as follows:

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.     
What hours, O what black hours we have spent     
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!     
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.     

With witness I speak this. But where I say      
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament     
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent     
To dearest him that lives alas! away.     

The stabs of sound from muted brass and the pizzicato strings at the opening of Holt’s piece certainly evoke a blackness as much psychological as a mere matter of colour, and it is only with the later ‘lightness’ that emanates from the flutes and the celesta (in particular) that a kind of musical affirmation of light (however tentative), an emergence of light from darkness, seems to be proposed. It is followed by ‘rudhira’, glossed thus by Holt in his programme note: “The second movement, ‘rudhira’, takes its title from the Sanskrit word for red, the first colour ever named”. That being the case it is reasonable to hear in the scurrying momentum of the writing here the transformation of the light hinted at in the close of ‘the fell of dark’ into a specific colour. The shortest of the pieces, ‘rudhira’ is the most rhythmically insistent of the five, the least monumental. The third movement, ‘Ellsworth’ takes its title from the name of Ellsworth Kelly, the American abstract painter, whose work most characteristically employs regular (more or less) geometrical shapes. Holt apparently had in mind one particular canvas, Yellow Relief with Black, of 1993. My own synæsthetic awareness is not acute enough for me to be able to say that I ‘heard’ yellow and black in Holt’s music, though I was certainly aware of its use of two clearly juxtaposed sections which presumably responded to the yellow and (smaller) black triangles of Kelly’s painting. Certainly Holt’s use of unexpected combinations of instruments made for some striking effects here and the writing for flutes and piccolo deserved its prominent position in the piece. ‘Huye, luna, luna luna’ (“Run away, moon, moon, moon”) takes as its staring point Lorca’s poem ‘Romance de la luna, luna’ (One of the most moon-obsessed of poets, Lorca fits to perfection Theseus’ observation – to return to A Midsummer Night’s Dream - that  “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact”). Lorca’s poem has the moon speak of its “blancor almidonado” (“starched whiteness”) before it takes a child by the hand and carries it across the sky. Holt’s music here is largely scored for the strings, though with some use of harp and percussion. There’s a lunar glow, chilly but bright, to Holt’s string writing here, like a moonglade on the surface of the sea. The fifth section (to use as a title what were allegedly Goethe’s last words ‘Mehr Licht’, struck me as a bit presumptuous) reuses material from the four earlier movements, making for some interesting juxtapositions and unifications.

Throughout, the work of van Steen and the orchestra was of a high order and they brought out plenty of intriguing and striking detail in Holt’s work, much of which I found fascinating. This was my first hearing of the piece and I am not, as yet, entirely sure that the whole is better than some of the parts. But further hearings – and I certainly hope that I shall get such opportunities – may encourage a change of mind. 

More poetry with Alun Hoddinott’s Lizard, of 2003. In 1995 Hoddinott wrote a set of four songs under the title Tymhorau (Seasons), setting texts by Gwyn Thomas, accomplished poet in both languages of Wales. The text he set for summer, was Thomas’s heat-filled poem which observes and evokes the sudden movements (and equally sudden stillnesses) of a lizard seen, in fierce sunlight, upon an ancient wall in Provence. Responding to a later commission from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales (in 2003), Hoddinott produced an extended (the piece lasts almost thirty minutes) orchestral response to the same poem. It would be wrong to think of the piece as straightforwardly programmatic – apart from anything else the twenty one short lines of Thomas’s poem alone would hardly fuel a piece of such length. But Hoddinott has clearly responded both to the poem’s contrast between suddenness and stillness and to Thomas’s use of musical metaphor within his text: 

            It’s a lizard

            Come out

            To warm its blood in the sun. 

            Small, mottled, stock-still

            With skin like tissue paper

            Respirating energy.

            Then a pizzicato

            Across the wall, across its sunlight:

            Another stop,

            Respires again.

            Then cranks on

            As in an old film. 

Hoddinott’s score alternates faster and slower sections, in a relatively loose A-B-A-B-A structure and is built around two essential motifs, a pattern of triplets which ascends to a motif of fast repeated notes and, on the other hand, a group of five rhythmically pronounced semiquavers. At times one can ‘hear’ images from Thomas’s poem very clearly: some of the orchestral textures seeming to evoke, with some vividness the sensory juxtapositions of “sunlight, a lizard, a wall / An old, old wall” and some of the changes of tempo evocative of the abruptness of the lizard’s stoppings and startings. At other times, Hoddinott seems more concerned to explore the purely musical possibilities of his material, and the references to Thomas’s poem seem to (largely) disappear. The explicitly programmatic and the more ‘abstract’ elements aren’t perhaps always fully integrated, but this is certainly a very accomplished score and van Steen and his orchestra were certainly persuasive advocates for it, responsive to Hoddinott’s vivid contrasts of colour and sonority.

If the Hoddinott Hall and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales can bring us more enterprising programmes of contemporary music of this kind, then we shall have many reasons for profound gratitude.

Glyn Pursglove 

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