Michael Gielen (conductor)
Gielen Edition Volume 10: Music after 1945
Music by Boulez, Cage, Crumb, Feldman, Gielen, Kagel, Kurtág, Ligeti, López, Nono & Zimmermann.
Soloists, SWR Vokalensemble, Rundfunkchor Berlin, Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunk München, SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg/Michael Gielen.
rec. live & studio 1969-2010, Baden-Baden, Frankfurt, Freiburg, Stuttgart, Schwäbisch-Gmünd & Strasbourg-Bischheim.
SWR MUSIC SWR19111CD [6 CDs: 408 mins]x
This issue completes SWR’s series of ten boxes in their Michael Gielen Edition, which has covered his cycles of the complete symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler as well as much 20th century music, not least Bartok, Stravinsky and the Second Viennese School. Many of those were often available on individual CDs before, but this issue is mainly of hitherto unreleased material, and thus arguably the most valuable in terms of repertoire. Its focus is post-war music from musicians, most of whom were personally well-known to the conductor. The distribution across the six CDs has no logic that I could discern, except that two of the discs each contains one composer (López and Zimmermann) and one of those just one work (the latter’s Requiem). I will therefore discuss the performances alphabetically by composer, as in the detailed list below.
The two Boulez items are among the few that have been available before, included as fillers to Gielen’s recording of Mahler’s 9th Symphony, which is where I first heard them, and where Rituel made a bracing and apposite successor to the finale of the symphony. Rituel and the Notations I-IV are studio recordings (Notation VII is live, from the same concert as the Mahler, but the sound is not very different from the rest). Rituel is given a performance of cumulative power by Gielen, second only to the composer’s own with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The Notations are fine also, although the most challenging of them to perform, No 2 marked Trčs vif. Strident, is a bit steady at 2:14, when Barenboim who conducted the premiere, needs just 1:58. The composer’s own version is swifter still at 1:45 - “I like to put myself in danger”, he commented - but overall, Boulez is well served here by his fellow conductor (and fellow resident in Baden-Baden).
Cage’s Concert for Piano & Orchestra is an elusive piece. It is scored for “any solo or combination of piano, flute, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, tuba, 3 violins, 2 violas, cello, and double bass.” There is no score, as its “63 very detailed pages are to be played, in whole or in part, in any sequence, involving 84 'types' of composition”. These pages are to be performed, in whole or in part, in any duration. Furthermore, the conductor – who is said to be optional – should, if needed, act as a chronometer whose arms simulate the movement of the hands of a clock.” It is seen by musicologists - and others - as a seminal work in Cage’s own output and in twentieth-century musical techniques, not least the idea of open form. Claude Helffer’s piano playing and Gielen’s direction make this still high avant-garde piece coherent, and it is full of interesting sounds. With the Boulez on disc six it makes a thought-provoking close to the box set.
George Crumb’s seven-movement Star-Child (1977, revised 1979), for soprano, antiphonal children's voices, male speaking choir (who also play hand-bells), and large orchestra. It needs two primary and two secondary conductors. Like other works by the composer, it deploys Biblical quotations and a contrast between light and dark, leaving a place of despair and darkness and reaching the light. This is the scheme of the chosen texts and the direction of the music, which begins in low frequency gloom and moves at the end, thirty minutes on, to the bell sounds of light and final breathy whispers of “Libera me”. This impressive account is of Gielen’s performance of the German premiere in Schwäbisch-Gmünd, and a first release. It is a dramatic and accessible piece.
Morton Feldman’s Coptic Light (1986) was a New York Philharmonic commission and his last orchestral work. He said of its origins, “Having an avid interest in all varieties of arcane weaving of the Middle East I recently viewed the stunning examples of early Coptic textiles on permanent display at the Louvre.” Seeking analogies in music he referred to “Sibelius’ observation that the orchestra differed mainly from the piano in that it has no pedal. With this in mind, I set to work to create an orchestral pedal, continually varying in nuance. This “chiaroscuro” is both the compositional and the instrumental focus of Coptic Light”. Though for large orchestra (quadruple winds and brass, etc.), it is mostly quiet and static. The Universal Edition website says it plays for 30 minutes, but here Gielen takes under 24 minutes, and nothing sounds rushed. There is a certain alluring glow to this piece.
Michael Gielen the composer has a small catalogue – about twenty pieces. Like Mahler (his favourite composer) he composed only in the summer, and Gielen wrote less as the years passed. Vier Gedichte von Stefan George is for mixed chorus and an unusual collection of 19 instruments, including six clarinets - which dominate the first chorus, and with surprising variety of effect - four cellos, four trombones, piano and percussion. Gielen set one of the four Stefan George poems over successive years, and they are well varied in mood and effect. The SWR Vokalensemble sings with clarity and precision in this first release of the recording. Pflicht und Neigung (Duty and Inclination) is for an ensemble of 22 musicians playing winds, brass and percussion (no strings), including instrumental doublings. These are divided into three groups complex enough to require a second conductor. The Webern influence is slightly audible at times, and attractive for those attuned to its spare beauty. The colours Gielen obtains from winds and brass are varied and appealing, too. This one of the works, new to me like most on the set, that I am sure I will play again.
György Kurtág’s Stele (Greek for a memorial slab) is for large orchestra, and was dedicated to conductor and composer András Mihály, Kurtág’s compatriot and friend. It was commission by the Berlin Philharmonic in 1994, while Kurtág was composer-in-residence for the orchestra. The piece was premiered in Berlin, on 14 December 1994, by the Berliners under Claudio Abbado. It has three short connected movements and is filled, as we might expect, with sounds of lamentation, as well as some vehement passages. There is even a solemn chorale for Wagner tubas marked “homage ŕ Bruckner” and Gielen likens its final sadness to that “we feel when listening to Schubert”, so there are plenty of reference points to find a way into the 13-minute piece. You can hear why Gielen programmed it often, and surely not just, as the booklet mentions, to help the impecunious composer.
Mauricio Kagel’s Ein Brief, a “concert scene for mezzo-soprano and orchestra” was to be a setting of a love letter, or that was the initial impulse but Kagel sets only the salutation “My love” and the rest of the ten minutes is a wordless vocalise, a piece of “instrumental theatre” for which there are instructions to the singer about the letter’s contents and her position in her chair and the tearing up of the letter at the end. Clearly the sound-only medium of CD can convey only some of all this, and I did not find it a fully convincing experience. Soprano Klára Csordás has a tight vibrato, but deals pretty well with the demands of her part, as far as the hearer knows or can guess the missing text. The instrumental sounds, inventive and at times exhilarating, suggest this was a less-than-happy relationship, but who knows?
Ligeti’s Requiem sets four sections from the traditional text: Introitus, subdued and searching; Kyrie, a complex choral movement reaching a fortissimo climax (a passage used in Kubrick’s film “2001: A Space Odyssey); Dies Irae, with vocal and orchestral dramatic extremes; and Lacrimosa, for the two female soloists and orchestra, recalling the mood of the opening. Gielen conducted the work’s premiere and this second of his recordings is a new release, with the original two soloists and choral forces who had come to know the work. It also deploys the initial double choir structure which Ligeti later combined into one large chorus. That later version is well served by Jonathan Nott, London Voices and the Berlin Philharmonic on Teldec in a 2002 live performance, but this live 1969 Gielen account has an obvious importance and very good sound indeed for its date.
Jorge E. López was born in 1955 in Cuba, from 1960 grew up and studied in the U.S, moved to Europe in 1990, and now lives in Vienna. He states "I have never identified myself with the term 'New Music,'… I was driven from the beginning by the idea of making the primordial present.” That last phrase is a fair clue to the fascinating sounds he gives us in the two scores here. López sent an early orchestral score, Landscape with Martyrdom, to Gielen in Cincinnati where he was chief conductor from 1980 to 1986. Gielen premiered it in Europe in 1987, which was López’s breakthrough. Breath-Hammer-Lightning is for orchestra or rather groups of players who move around the performance space. At its centre are a number of long pauses, each extended silence broken by a loud crashing chord. Dome Peak is for 82 players positioned around the audience. These massive scores took years for the composer to perfect, and Gielen proves a dedicated champion – the performances of the two works here are of their German and World premieres on 20 September 1993 in Frankfurt, and sound thoroughly prepared. The recording is from the conductor’s own DAT tape and the booklet has a warning about the dynamic range it preserves. This first release is an important document.
The three works by Luigi Nono, another of Gielen’s friends, each refers to someone he honoured. Variazioni canoniche is a set of variations on a theme by Schoenberg (whose daughter Nono married) and remarkably assured and beguiling in its quiet concentration, considering it is his Opus One. A Carlo Scarpa touchingly commemorates the Venetian architect killed in an accident in 1978, while No hay caminos hay que caminar… Andrei Tarkovsky refers to the Russian film maker, who Nono never met, but whose Andrei Rublev was the composer’s favourite film. The quote “Traveller, there is no path, only travelling” was seen by Nono inscribed on a monastery wall, and seemed to sum up his own creative philosophy. Its seven instrumental groups are positioned around the performance space, an effect hardly available in stereo, but something of its quality still comes over here. These three live performances are from a Nono commemoration disc first issued on Auvidis in 1990, and still sound very impressive.
Bernd Alois Zimmerman’s Requiem für einen jungen Dichter is the biggest work here, occupying the whole of disc one. Gielen’s link to the composer began when he gave the premiere of his now legendary opera Die Soldaten, shortly before giving the 1969 premiere of this Requiem – two works which must have required a vast amount
of preparation.
This huge score, ten years in the making, is for three choruses, soprano, and bass soloists, speaking parts for two actors and persons within the chorus. Instrumentally there is an organ, electronic tapes, a jazz quintet, and a very large orchestra. There are numerous texts, and though Zimmermann first intended to use words only by three young poets who had committed suicide, he gradually added verbal sources in several languages; political speeches, passages from the Latin Requiem text, the voices of Mao, Hitler, and even part of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” The result was a powerful memorial not only for those young poets, but for the twentieth century, and the crisis of civilisation it brought and that Zimmerman had experienced. It is now seen as a seminal work of that century, and ultimately cannot be described, only experienced. The composer took his own life a few months after its premiere.
Gielen’s account here is its first release, and sounds to me about as good as a stereo CD can feasibly contain, and of historical importance coming from the conductor who gave the piece more than anyone else. But the issue in 2008 of an SACD by Cybele Records enabled the complex layers to be heard still more clearly, at least by those with a 5.0 surround sound set-up. The booklet also explains what material is being read or sung and when – though so much text and translations can be included only in the tiniest print.
There are no texts or translations of anything sung or spoken in the SWR booklet, but much other valuable information about the composers, the music and Gielen himself. In summary this is a highly valuable collection of superb performances of some elusive major works. It will serve very well anyone curious about mid-twentieth century classical music beyond – often far beyond - Britten, Shostakovich and Copland.
Roy Westbrook
Contents
Pierre BOULEZ (1925-2016) Notations I-IV and VII [17:23];
Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna [27:36]
John CAGE (1912-1992) Concert for Piano & Orchestra [22:51]
George CRUMB (1929-) Star-Child [32:21]
Morton FELDMAN (1926-1987) Coptic Light [23:34]
Michael GIELEN (1927-2019) Vier Gedichte von Stefan George [22:29]; Pflicht und Neigung for ensemble [25:56]
Mauricio KAGEL (1931-2008) Ein Brief - Concert Scene for mezzo-soprano and orchestra [9:00]
György KURTÁG (1926-) Stele for large orchestra, Op 33 [12:58]
György LIGETI (1923-2006) Requiem [27:02]
Jorge E. LÓPEZ (1955-) Breath-Hammer-Lightning for orchestra [26:20]; Dome Peak [40:15]
Luigi NONO (1924-1990) A Carlo Scarpa [9:44]; No hay caminos hay que caminar [23:47] Variazioni canoniche [20:08]
Bernd Alois ZIMMERMANN (1918-1970) Requiem für einen jungen Dichter [65:42]
