21 MAY FRIDAY SERIES 14

Transcription

1 21 MAY FRIDAY SERIES 14 Helsinki Music Centre at 19 HARRISON BIRTWISTLE 80 YEARS Hannu Lintu, conductor Christianne Stotijn, mezzo-soprano Simon O Neill, tenor Harrison Birtwistle: Earth Dances 38 min INTERVAL 20 min Gustav Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth): a symphony for tenor, alto and orchestra 62 min 1. Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde (The Drinking Song of Earth s Misery) orchestration Colin Matthews 2. Der Einsame im Herbst (The Lonely One in Autumn) 3. Von der Jugend (Of Youth) 4. Von der Schönheit (Of Beauty) 5. Der Trunkene im Frühling (The Drunken Man in Spring) 6. Der Abschied (The Farewell) Interval at about The concert ends at about

2 A BIRD S EYE- PERSPECTIVE THE FRSO IS ESPECIALLY GOOD AT OVERCOMING DIFFICULTIES SUCH AS THIS Harrison Birtwistle s Earth Dances is reputed to be devilishly difficult to play. Hannu Lintu, what makes it so difficult? The general opinion about Birtwistle seems to be that his music is somehow exceptionally incredible. The fact that performances of his work are often accompanied by some sort of scandal doesn t help. When, for example, Avanti! Played Panic in Helsinki ten years or so ago, one pillar of society got so furious he began shouting in the middle of the performance. It even got reported in the evening paper. It s true that Earth Dances does have a reputation for being a bit tricky, but it s nevertheless finding its way into the staple modern repertoire. But Birtwistle IS always challenging for the performers. His habit of writing long, wandering melodic lines and restless, enchanting combinations of fragmentary rhythmic impulses is technically challenging for the whole band. Everything s relative, of course: as regards conducting technique, the last song in Mahler s Das Lied von der Erde is the most difficult item in this concert. Earth Dances contains an unusual amount of layered information. The 30-violin section demanded by Birtwistle is, for example, very often divided into at least 15 parts. There are no fewer than nine percussionists, too, so it s a pretty big score. But lots of other complex music has been composed since 1986, and in this respect Earth Dances is no longer in any way an exceptional work. True, it has enough difficulties, but the FRSO is especially good at overcoming these. There is indeed a vast number of notes to play. Lots of really complicated writing and then of course everything has to be fully coordinated. Added to which, the tempos are constantly changing, often in some mathematical relationship. Earth Dances is highly reminiscent of Stravinsky s Rite of Spring: it does not build up long spans within sections, and the performer has to be constantly prepared for some new, unexpected cut. Earth Dances is, of course, a challenge for the listener, too. There are lots of levels based on different combinations of instruments. They can quickly be spotted in the score, but following them just by listening may be hard. So how would you advise people to listen to this work? The wisest thing is just to sit back and let the waves of sound wash over you without really trying to analyse them. If you re constantly trying to focus on details, you may miss something really important. In the end, you will sense the existence of different levels. This piece has a lot of Wagner to it: the vast modules change places slowly and with an inevitable logic. 2

3 Mahler s Das Lied von der Erde is not a symphony in the conventional sense, but it s not a true song cycle either. How would you personally classify it? Mahler himself first called it a symphony, and the six-movement format is not of course in any way unusual for him. There are, however, rather few symphonic structures in the movements. The first song, for example, has three verses: you can t call that symphonic form however hard you try. The last song could be likened to, say, the closing Adagio of the Tenth Symphony, because the text is freer in form. In the middle of the work there are, it s true, two scherzo-type movements. I personally nevertheless think of Das Lied von der Erde as a song cycle. What thoughts do the words of the songs arouse in you? For me, the fact that Mahler specifically uses Chinese poetry is enchanting and somehow musically liberating, because the texts of his earlier vocal work Des Knaben Wunderhorn create a slightly militant and one-dimensional basic colour scheme. The poems of Das Lied von der Erde are far more subtle and multi-layered. Mahler s neuroses form an interesting parallel with the clear Oriental thinking. Mahler did, of course, look for texts that would emphasise his own unhappy state. There is, for example, a hair-raising moment in the first song in which the narrator tells the listeners about an ape that howls on graves. Mahler himself had undoubtedly felt that Fate was laughing at him in the same way. According to Theodor Adorno, the tenor soloist should at this point forget Western voice production and try to imitate the way the Peking Opera sings. Tragedy is often hidden behind the most innocent images: in the third song, a group of youngsters are enjoying a beautiful, lazy day chatting and writing verses, but at the same time everything is reflected on the nearby pond, all distorted and upside down. Everything is fine, but there is a reverse side to everything. At this point Mahler s harmony is also utterly distorted. Drinking is an important element; the fifth song is nothing short of a description of chronic alcoholism. The guy drinks regardless. So what if spring does or doesn t come? Just let him drink himself to sleep again. The last movement, Abschied, totally crystallises the mood of the whole work in the Oriental manner, subtly yet all the more devastatingly. The end of Abschied has to be played quietly, as if a door were slowly shutting, or as if the orchestra were rising up into the air and vanishing far away in the distance. Mahler creates a picture of a world in which everything goes on for ever apart from mankind. Nature is supremely beautiful but life is full of quiet suffering. It is never quite clear what the source of that suffering ultimately is. Perhaps it s just life itself. An interview by Lotta Emanuelsson translated by Susan Sinisalo 3

4 HARRISON BIRTWISTLE (B. 1934): EARTH DANCES One of Harrison Birtwistle s fellow students in Manchester in the 1950s was Peter Maxwell Davies, and the following decade they together formed an ensemble called The Fires of London that quickly won itself a worldwide reputation. The great orchestral fresco Earth Dances dates from 1986, and its numerous widely-acclaimed performances have made it a modern classic. The listener can easily imagine a theatrical or at least a strongly visual element, and as is often the case with Birtwistle, the subject is boldly and unashamedly big. Birtwistle would appear to have made a careful study of the geological background for his fantasy. He has not, however, applied seismological calculations to his structures. Instead, his approach seems delightfully simple. He presents Earth s choreography at six levels and divides the orchestra into six sections according to the instruments pitch ranges: the lowest instruments are one group, the slightly higher ones another, and so on. The highest instruments on the pitch scale represent the top layer, Earth s surface. The section hierarchy varies as the work proceeds so that each level may in turn occupy the foreground, fade into the background, be a latent resource or vanish altogether. There is nothing unusual in contemporary music about dividing an orchestra into smaller groups. But the results vary greatly. In many cases, the subdivision does not in practice influence the listening experience in any way, being no more than an insider joke shared by the orchestra, conductor and composer. Not so with Earth Dances: though the listener may not be aware of every shift in focus and indeed does not need to be the overall effect is a strong feeling of a causal relationship between the strata. When things begin to happen down below, the listener can be sure that something earth-shaking will soon take place higher up. Earth Dances is both impressive and convincing, as much a stunningly sweeping fresco as a shattering drama. Despite handling vast masses of sound, Birtwistle has paced the work as a whole to make it meaningful. One is tempted to say that his skill at conjuring up an orchestra steeped in colour comes second only to his natural charisma as a primitive shaman now if ever, his rhythms may literally be termed volcanic! Jouni Kaipainen GUSTAV MAHLER ( ): DAS LIED VON DER ERDE Das Lied von der Erde occupies a unique position in Gustav Mahler s output. Neither fully symphony nor song cycle, the work has sadly accumulated a freight of morbid associations due to its being conceived in the wake of three shattering blows to Mahler s life 4

5 in 1907: his departure from the Vienna Court Opera after his controversial tenure as director, the diagnosis of the fatal heart condition that would claim his life a scant three years later, and most poignantly, the tragic death of his eldest daughter from scarlet fever. The text s musings on grief, loss and leavetaking certainly lend the impression of a stricken composer s long gaze into the void. Mahler himself did the work no favors in his oft-quoted (and likely ironic) comment to the conductor Bruno Walter about the closing pages of the final song, Der Abschied : Is that to be endured at all? Will not people do away with themselves after hearing it? But this is to overlook the powerful synthesis Mahler undertook in grafting an Eastern solution onto a Western problem, like a bonsai with two different colored blossoms. For though exotic in its trappings the texts were drawn from Hans Bethge s adaptations of ancient Chinese poetry, and the music frequently evokes Asian melodies the narrative of Das Lied is one central to Romantic song, wherein a suffering protagonist seeks to lose himself in nature, and instead finds death in a wilderness that cares nothing for his human needs. This Beethovenian question, Warum muß es sein? is the crux of the work, intoned by the contralto soloist following the cataclysmic funeral march of Der Abschied. The orchestral response is like nothing else in symphonic history, a slow flowering of the most radiant, enveloping music Mahler ever composed. All striving ceases, and the music enters a new kind of time; the air fills with cycling patterns, like a multitude of golden wheels spinning ceaselessly against each other. The problem is not death, it is the suffering that wills one to death. Taking leave of suffering, Zen-like, death is made irrelevant, as we achieve a steady-state of wakeful awareness to the alto s longbreathed, mantra-like Ewig. The end is no end, only a cessation of sounding. The music, it is implied, continues infinitely after the song stops. Matthew Whittall CHRISTIANNE STOTIJN Dutch mezzo-soprano Christianne Stotijn has been the winner of numerous distinctions, among them the ECHO Rising Star and the Borletti- Buitoni awards, and the Netherlands Music Prize. A former student of Udo Reinemann, Jard van Nes and Noelle Barker at the Amsterdam Conservatory and of Dame Janet Baker, she made her breakthrough singing Mahler s Rückert-Lieder with the French National Orchestra and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra under Bernard Haitink. With Haitink, she has also performed Mahler s second symphony, Das Lied von der Erde, Beethoven s Ninth Symphony and Bach s St. Matthew Passion. Other orchestras with which she has appeared, under celebrated conductors, include the Berlin and London Philharmonics and the Chicago and Boston Symphonies. 5

6 Christianne Stotijn is also renowned as a Lieder singer. She regularly appears with pianists Joseph Breinl and Julius Drake at such prestigious venues as the Wigmore Hall in London, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Vienna Musikverein, Carnegie Hall, New York and the Salzburg Mozarteum. Her operatic repertoire includes Pauline in The Queen of Spades, Ottavia in Poppea and Cornelia in Julius Caesar. Among the items in Christianne Stotijn s discography are works by Schubert, Berg, Wolf and Mahler. Her disc of songs by Tchaikovsky won the BBC Music Magazine Award in 2010 and that of works by Frank Martin earned her an ECHO Award. Examples of the roles in Simon O Neill s repertoire are Siegmund in Wagner s Die Walküre, Rodolfo in Puccini s La bohème, Florestan in Beethoven s Fidelio, and the title roles in Mozart s Idomeneo and Wagner s Lohengrin. Engagements this season include appearances as Siegmund at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and the Berlin State Opera, the title role in Parsifal at Covent Garden and Wozzeck at the New York Metropolitan. He has, among others, recorded operas by Wagner, Verdi and Mozart, Mahler s Eighth and Beethoven s Ninth Symphony. SIMON O NEILL A native of New Zealand, Simon O Neill has established himself as one of the finest Helden-tenors on the international stage. He regularly appears at the world s leading opera houses (the New York Metropolitan, Covent Garden, La Scala, etc.) and has collaborated with such renowned conductors as James Levine, Riccardo Muti, Valery Gergiev, Daniel Barenboim and Sir Colin Davis. He has also performed at the Salzburg and Bayreuth Festivals and at Carnegie Hall. In addition to singing opera he has been the soloist with numerous orchestras in such repertoire as Beethoven s Ninth Symphony and Schönberg s Gurrelieder. THE FINNISH RADIO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (FRSO) is the orchestra of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yle). Its mission is to produce and promote Finnish musical culture and its Chief Conductor as of autumn 2013 is Hannu Lintu. The Radio Orchestra of ten players founded in 1927 grew to symphony orchestra strength in the 1960s. Its previous Chief Conductors have been Toivo Haapanen, Nils-Eric Fougstedt, Paavo Berglund, Okko Kamu, Leif Segerstam, Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Sakari Oramo. The FRSO has two Honorary Conductors: Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Sakari Oramo. 6

7 The latest contemporary music is a major item in the repertoire of the FRSO, which each year premieres a number of Yle commissions. Another of the orchestra s tasks is to record all Finnish orchestral music for the Yle archive. During the 2013/2014 season it will premiere six Finnish works commissioned by Yle. The FRSO has recorded works by Eötvös, Nielsen, Hakola, Lindberg, Saariaho, Sallinen, Kaipainen, Kokkonen and others, and the debut disc of the opera Aslak Hetta by Armas Launis. Its discs have reaped some major distinctions, such as the BBC Music Magazine Award and the Académie Charles Cros Award. The disc of the Sibelius and Lindberg violin concertos (Sony BMG) with Lisa Batiashvili as the soloist received the MIDEM Classical Award in 2008, in which year the New York Times chose the other Lindberg disc as its Record of the Year. The FRSO regularly tours to all parts of the world. During the 2013/2014 season it will be visiting Central Europe under the baton of Hannu Lintu. All the FRSO concerts both in Finland and abroad are broadcast, usually live, on Yle Radio 1. They can also be heard and watched with excellent stream quality on yle.fi/rso. 7