Pekka Kuusisto and pianist Olli Mustonen at Wigmore Hall

11/04/13

The recital opened with Beethoven's Violin Sonata No 6 in A op.30/1. Musicologists and program note writers love pointing out that the title page of these and other late classical/early romantic string sonatas denote that they are Sonatas for pianoforte with violin accompaniment, not the other way round as we usually think of violin sonatas. This always seems like irritating knit picking when it's stated in dry prose, but this performance seemed to embody this idea. Eschewing legato, pianist Olli Mustonen dominated the aural picture, smashing out every sforzando and right hand melody with brutal percussive force - the lack of contrast or release made for tiring and even irritating listening from him. Especially so when Pekka Kuusisto's violin playing was so spellbindingly brilliant, finding endless nuance, fun, and interest in even the simplest phrases, fast passages dazzlingly dispatched, a chain of lissome, searching string sound. Not everything that comes out of his violin is beautiful, and sometimes the sound can even be downright ugly, but it's always surprising, unaffected and totally convincing. Occasionally he'll also just spin the most breathtaking phrase that follows every rule of tasteful "proper" playing. I simply don't know of any other currently performing musician that is so open to risk taking or unbeholden to previous standards and so manifestly an artist of the first standing (this last thing is important in light of the first two things). Kuusisto's musical choices in the Beethoven were as quirky and unconventional as Mustonen's but the difference was that he managed to create living, breathing art, whereas Mustonen remained merely weird and violently loud.

Observing Kuusisto playing, and as a string player admiring his freedom, it became obvious to me where his very particular genius lies. His left arm is as good as anyone's, with beautifully accurate intonation, a large palette of vibratos, and superb virtuosity. But it's his right arm (that is his bowing arm) that is truly exceptional and puts him musically ahead of most of his peers. The freedom of movement, supreme control, and ceaseless exploration of approaches to the bow affords him an unlimited expressive resource and infinite musical possibilities - his range of timbres, colours, articulations and phrasing choices is bewildering, and the speed and ease with which he can switch between them equally unfathomable. And after all this wild stuff that no one else can do, he'll whip out some old school perfect Russian bow hold (Heifetz/Elman/Oistrakh/Kogan take your pick) and play with the imperious nobility of these old masters.

For those that don't much care about the subtleties of string technique, what this translates to for the listener without fail is edge of the seat music making where you have to hang on every note for fear of not taking in what is unfolding in front of you. But fear is not the right word to describe the experience of seeing him play - joy is closer. The barrier between musician and music is invisible. Just this week I commended Carolin Widmann as being a model of great string playing, but this is the absolute opposite and equally beautiful.

Enough fangirling.

The second item on the program was the world premiere of Mustonen's own violin sonata. The first movement opens with an angular figure that is relentlessly continued in the violin virtually without pause, gradually building to a climax of considerable power and intensity that feels very Schnittkerian. The second movement starts with an extended almost direct quotation/transcription from portions of "Dance of the Earth" from The Rite of Spring (my brief over the shoulder scan of the program notes made no official mention of this) but soon this is combines with the mania of a middle period Shostakovich scherzo, and the thundering extremity of Ustvolskaya. (After Googling the proper spelling of her name, I see that by amazing coincidence Tom Service has just this week written an article about her at the Guardian website which is good as an introduction if you aren't already familiar with her singular oeuvre). A more lyrical episode follows before a dutiful recapitulation of the opening. There are some excellent moments, and bits that are memorable, but overall it feels a little too derivative for comfort - the nagging feeling that there is nothing here that hasn't been done more inventively by the composers mentioned above. Still an excellent performance by both artists and one that surely must be considered close to definitive, Mustonen's piano writing clearly reflecting his playing style and Kuusisto fully up to the demands of the tortuous violin writing.

Stravinsky's Duo Concertante opened the second half. In general, Stravinsky's piano writing is usually rather percussive which meant that Mustonen had a field day, never giving the lyrical violin part room to breath, smothering it in a welter of xylophonic bangs and crashes. We only have to hear Stravinsky's own recording with Szigeti to hear that this was not at all what he intended. Only in the final movement, where the piano has long chords while the violin plays its awed, exquisitely carved melody, was the right balance achieved and the restrained neoclassical beauty of the piece revealed.

Ravel's violin sonata has always seemed to me to be a weak link in his otherwise flawless oeuvre, but Kuusisto played it more convincingly than I have ever heard it previously. The first movement emerged as a naively youthful romance, Kuusisto spinning a delicate line of melting ardency and sweetness, a hundred miles from the crystalline artifice that Ravel is famed for and that we all think we know. Or maybe we've all just been missing the point - the frail heart of Ravel has never been so tenderly revealed to me. The pizzicatos that opened the second movement "Blues" were hilariously abrupt and unringing from Kuusisto, but then it all became clear 30 seconds later when the piano started making the exact same noise when accompanying the violin. Totally uncanny. There's very little that actually suggests the Blues about this movement, but Kuusisto again seemed to get it exactly right with his free floating, almost casual approach, with nothing too emphatic: many violinists completely over-egg the written portamentos, and are much too insistent rhythmically. The Perpetuum Mobile finale is never somehow the rip roaring finish that it seems to be aiming at, and again Mustonen was too loud to let the violin figurations speak. A shame, as he had up until this movement given his best contribution of the evening, supporting the violin line very beautifully in the first movement as well as bringing lovely details to the fore, and also acting as a brilliantly clear, stable base for Kuusisto's hazy intonations in the second movement.

We got two encores. The first was Stravinsky's Tango in an arrangement for violin and piano by Mustonen. The second was the second of Prokofiev's melodies op.35. In the poco piu mosso section after he applied the mute, Kuusisto found a sound I've just never heard before, veiled, unearthly, domed, that nonetheless had immense vibrancy, like a distant beautiful voice heard over a lake. 

Unfortunately youtube has very few clips of Kuusisto's playing, and nothing quite captures what I have been writing about. There is a video of him winning the Sibelius violin competition in 1995 aged 19. It's played very straight and the control is immaculate. It's almost boring because he's playing it as if it's nothing, and surely the heroic struggle is part of the drama and brilliance of the final movement of this concerto. A friend of mine joked that he decided to just nail it because it would be good for his career and then he could do what he wanted:

The next video is a closer indication to his freedom and imagination now - though the footage is frustratingly scant. Presumably the whole video recording exists somewhere...

Or try at 4:00 minutes here.

An utterly beautiful though more restrained recording of the four seasons exists on CD:

Renée Fleming with Gergiev and the LSO

15/07/2012

A rather disheartening way to end the season for me. The two orchestral showpieces on offer, Debussy's La Mer, and Stravinsky's Petrushka were perfectly acceptably played (the LSO rarely plays truly badly) but both felt a bit by rote, and Gergiev didn't offer anything particularly personal with either of them. I must admit that I've never seen the LSO be as responsive or play with as much energy with Gergiev as I have seen with Previn or Colin Davis. I found out recently from personal anecdotes that they feel very affectionately towards both Previn and Davis, so I wonder whether there is just a fundamental personality mismatch with Gergiev. Difficult to know if I've just caught a lot of off nights, or whether there's something in this...

The main draw of the evening was surely Renée Fleming, who sang two French song cycles that she has recently also recorded. My comments on the pieces and a review of that disc can be found here. She started with Dutilleux's song cycle Le Temps L'horlage, a poignant and quirky song cycle about time and yearning (shades of the Marschallin, Rusalka?) written especially for her. This is not a cycle that allows for much vocal display until the last song, and this was a softly shaded reading aiming mostly at text. Though always just about audible, Fleming was just hardly giving out any sound, and her trade mark endless legato seemed compromised and hard fought for. The lower notes occasionally became quite unstable timbrally and occasionally also with regards to intonation, traditionally also strengths. The last song at least brought some more fortitude in the voice, but never for sustained periods. Lacking in the voice now is the extraordinary vibrancy and beauty of timbre that it used to have, and also its rock steady technical security; all the time we feel strongly that she is shepherding her resources. She fared slightly better in Ravel Shéhérezade, but again this was a very small scale reading, and it just sounds like a completely different voice from the one it used to be. Very sad. She was quite good in her Ariadne's earlier this year, but I am now worried for her Munich Rosenkavaliers that I will be attending.

It pains me to write this because I really do believe that Fleming is the greatest singer of her generation, and certainly she is the singer (along with Callas) who has given me more listening pleasure than any other. She has talked throughout her career of the mystery of the voice, how it can just leave a singer in a very short time, and about early retirement and knowing when to retire. She has been very careful and prudent with repertoire selection for this reason, to keep the voice young and avoid damage at all costs, but age catches up with everyone sooner or later. I am sure she is only too aware of her current vocal condition, but I imagine it is much harder to actually stop singing than talk about it - emotionally, psychologically and not least financially.  Farewell dates at the Royal Opera House are being mooted for the 2016-2017 season (when she'll be 58) but I wonder how much voice will be left by then and I wonder also whether these next few years of singing will damage her legacy. Leontyne Price was still singing with unbelievable beauty at 58 (see here), but every soprano is very different - it doesn't just come down to careful vocal management, but also to genetics, hormones, mental health, self confidence, luck, and innumerable other factors.

Ultimately I can only express my unending gratitude to Renée Fleming for her voice and artistry, mercifully captured for posterity on so many wonderful recordings, which have afforded me so many hours of extraordinary pleasure. Beauty is a very fragile and ephemeral thing and one must be supremely grateful for the times it touches our lives and the ability it has to lift us above the mundane and into the numinous.

Stravinsky's Rake

A few of weeks ago I saw a great student production of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress in Cambridge, but I am not going to review it in depth. Christopher Stark was conducting, and I'm always impressed by his sense of enterprise and ambitiousness - he conducted an exquisite Pelléas and Mélisande as a student opera production last year - neither work is standard fare for amateur productions and both times the standard was superb. The singing from all, including the chorus (thank you Cambridge choral training!), was excellent, and the staging and directing was simple but very good. Very enjoyable indeed. Not quite the time stopping wonder of last year's Pelléas, but then it's a very different opera.

So what do I actually want to write about? Stravinsky's extraordinary music. This opera may be the most touching thing Stravinsky ever wrote - just occasionally in this piece, he relaxes the steely self concealment and perfect control and lets a bit of sentiment slip out, as this most emotionally demonstrative of genres requires. The farewell scene, Tom's brothel Cavatina, Anne's monologue, and most touching of all the final delirious reconciliation between the two leads are all very moving, even if they are still perhaps the most restrained utterances of their kind in the operatic repertoire. And they are only moving in relief from, and contrasted to, the normal tone of the opera: charmingly and cleanly neo classical, fast-paced, clear-hued, seeming almost naive in it's directness, if it weren't all so masterfully constructed.

This opera is Mozartian in a way that Strauss' "Mozart pastiches" never are (Der Rosenkavalier as Mozartian is one of the strangest and most disingenuous clichées that one hears repeated endlessly in musical criticism). Stravinsky famously had an aversion to Wagner (and Strauss) and this opera may well be the least Wagnerian opera of the 20th century; not just un-Wagnerian but anti-Wagnerian. References to his model, particularly to Don Giovanni, are everywhere: most obviously the division of music into numbers (arias, ensembles, cabalettas etc.) and recitatives (replete with harpsichord), but also the grave-yard scene, the dramatic descent of the sinful character into hell with accompanying fire and brimstone (though notably Mozart sends his Rake to hell, whereas Stravinsky does not), and most tellingly the moral drawn at the end with the characters addressing the audience directly.

Also Mozartian is the perfect sense of pacing and convincing comic tone (Auden's superb libretto, indeed Da Ponte-ian in quality, plays a large part here), the dramatic believability, the depth and range of emotion expressed with such felicity and such understatement (Mozart unquestionably more varied and natural in this however), warm invention of the orchestration (chamber in scale), rhythmic bouyancy, the elegantly pliant vocal lines (here wrought and sculpted with the text often oddly accented, contrasting with the completly "natural" expression in Mozart). Stravinsky the magpie is fully on display (Purcell, Gluck, Donizetti and early Verdi also part of the gumbo), albeit with (barely) more transformation of his source material than in the Pergolesi and Tchaikovsky reworkings. Stylistically in fact there is less transformation, and in some ways this is the greatest and most serious pastiche ever composed, though this pastiche is unusual in that it is never sentimental and only rarely affords us an ironic sidewards glance. A noticable discrepancy in approach with his echt-classical predecessor: Stravinsky can't help repeating musical material attatched to certain characters and moods as memory plays such an important role in the opera. This is nothing like Wagnerian Leitmotivic usage of course, but certainly not the Classical operatic practice of never repeating thematic material outside a "number". Stravinsky is too concerned with cyclicity, recollection and unity to completely shirk this useful innovation (though Mozart's late operas also each maintain remarkable unity... more on this at a later date).

The comparison with Strauss is again telling if we consider the orchestration. Both are masters of the orchestra but completely antagonistic in approach and effect. Stravinsky thrives on paucity of resource, and often does the most magical conjuring with the smallest and strangest instrumental combinations. To take an example: In Act 1, Scene 3, ("No word from Tom") the introduction scored for oboe, cor anglais and bassoon which in it's mournful caress nostalgically remembers the opening duet for the lovers (shades of Cosi), whilst simultaneously evoking the atmosphere and background of the scene too - has such a simple combination of instruments ever been more uniquely memorable or perfectly apt in every parameter? The timbre of the instruments, their registral characteristics combined with their voicings and spacing, and the rhythms employed are masterfully and artlessly united to perfectly set the scene here - the result in its way as atmospheric as anything in Strauss' orchestral paint-box. The effect is that one can always hear everything and keep track of all sounding elements in real time, whilst at the same time appreciating that the whole is somehow indescribably greater than its parts - as in Mozart, there's the feeling that there's nothing mysterious here, but like the magician who seems to show you his empty hands and demonstrates the plainness of the objects on the table, you still end up surprised and beguiled.

Strauss is of course the supreme master of orchestral opulence (better than Korngold, who tends towards aural blandness because everything is always piled on as thick as it will go), the large orchestra bending to his incredible fantasy and perfect control due to his consummate understanding of what it can do. The effect is always an integrated "whole orchestra" conception, the variously dizzyingly frothy, stridently heroic or warmly glowing wash of sound completely concealing its own means. Stravinsky's rate of ideas is much higher, which is part of what lends his music its compelling and uncapturable edge, but Strauss' rate of notes is by far the greater, and as they rush by, they completely overwhelm the senses.

The Rake's Progress is one of the finest operas of the post war years and represents in some respects an apotheosis of the neoclassical style. Schoenberg had just died when it was composed, and Stravinsky subsequently moved on to his final and least known period, finally able to embrace serialism which he had always seemed made for, now that the shadow of the German giant no longer loomed so large.