Tag: Olivier Messiaen

L’heure bleue at the Villa Aurora: Mark Robson —The Debussy Project

There is probably no pianist still breathing who hasn’t been fascinated (and perhaps frustrated) by the 1915 Études of Claude Debussy. It’s a foundational suite in several senses. Students of the instrument may initially approach them (or at least the first couple pages of the first) anticipating a witty and scintillating take on the technical exercise studies of Czerny and Cramer that every student of classical piano takes up at one point or another. (The first is subtitled (Pour les “cinq doigts,” d’après M. Czerny.) A number of pianist-composers through the 19^th and into the 20^th centuries took spirited revenge at this constant bane of the classical piano student. Chopin’s own celebrated Études are the epitome of the form—technical exercises elaborated into brilliant concert show pieces. Debussy’s unfold from a different place and mood—foundational certainly; but technically daunting (crushing for the less accomplished!) flights into a compositional and harmonic domain entirely Debussy’s own, and anticipating flights yet to come through the 20^th century and into the 21^st—which is where pianist Mark Robson has picked up the thread.

Robson’s idea for his Debussy Project concerts was to take the Debussy Études and, starting from a fresh re-examination (a ‘read-through’ as only a pianist of Robson’s virtuosity can deliver it), propose to 11 of his pianist-composer colleagues, a re-examination and re-working of Debussy’s harmonic, modal, melodic, thematic ideas through their own fresh variations and reimagining.

The resulting variations, ‘chords’, ‘nocturnes’, ‘calligrammes’, ‘confidences’, and, well, études, are as intriguing, probing, brilliant, and sheerly entertaining as one might expect, given the company Robson keeps: e.g., Vicki Ray (herself a local legend amongst contemporary pianist-composers), Thomas Kotcheff, Karl Kohn (on familiar turf in this domain), Nick Norton and Anne LeBaron (of Crescent City fame, among other works for voice and instrumental ensemble).

Robson also treated the audience (I was in the last audience for this concert at the Villa Aurora) to an introduction to these fresh departures, as well as re-introduction to the original Debussy Études that beautifully contextualized the work in the contemporary moment. 2018 marks the centenary of Debussy’s death; but the context Robson addressed here—and this was all about context (as opposed to the much-abused term, ‘concept’)—is much larger than simply a date, the end of one era or beginning of the next. Robson addressed the period of Debussy’s life in which the Études were written: he was dying (or soon to be dying) from cancer. He withdrew to an oceanside retreat in Normandy for his fresh take on so many of the ideas he had already developed through his career. (Water and nature were always inspirations for Debussy—and one of the treatments here makes reference to that fascination.) It was also, historically, the climax and culmination of World War I, which took so many French lives (and not very far from the place where he was composing). He was surrounded by death in a moment he was reimagining a musical ‘birth’—his own and ideas that would take 20^th century music far beyond it.

All of this is tremendously resonant in a moment when both human civilization and all of nature seem to hang in the balance. We’re returning to foundations and fundamentals; starting over.

Some of the freshly commissioned works involved preparation or special handling of the piano, minor electronica, or even a second piano or voice (on this evening, Robson had to fill the shoes of his original second pianist, Vicki Ray). Daniel Rothman’s Calligramme acoustique: hommage à Apollinaire (effectively a double-homage) required an altered ‘E’ with a 12^th interval resonance—but went far beyond the ‘after-Czerny’ five-finger template to continue building double and triple harmonic layers. Juhi Bansal’s offering, inspired by the 8^th étude, went far beyond Debussy’s intended ‘ornamental’ parameters to build hypnotic ostinatos of chords modulating up and down the scales. It could be said that the original goes well beyond the ‘intended’ scope, too; but this was just gorgeous. Nick Norton, too, went beyond Debussy’s notional repeated notes and figures (from the 9th étude) in an Étude avant l’arrêt du temps originally arranged for Robson and a second piano ideally to be played by Vicki Ray, to plunge into the modal harmonic and seemingly rhythmically expressed temporal leaps of the Debussy to build a something closer to a cathédrale engloutie.

The Debussy 10^th is where we have a real sense of that ‘engloutie’—already pushing that envelope of harmonic abstraction (with its deliberately opposed sonorities). Here Anne LeBaron has simultaneously complicated and streamlined that harmonic conversation by way of the human voice—the soloist’s own and an ‘interlocutor’ (voiced by Lynda Sue Marks-Guarnieri), who engaged Robson at intervals with a kind of Proust Questionnaire. Robson played—and sang—his responses and declarations with an air of surprise, serendipity, and occasionally irony (his favorite writers being Poe, Baudelaire and Flaubert). It played off as a kind of restatement of the Debussy mission (as if voiced by Debussy himself), seemingly restating musical ideas that morphed in others’ hands (e.g., Ravel, Chabrier, and later Stravinsky, Milhaud, etc.).

Robson’s own variation (on Étude 7), Les débris d’un rêve, featured an electronic track, and between the recorded track and the piano swept up many of these ideas between glissandos, raspy inhalations and exhalations, swelling, tenebrous chords and bass notes, trills that were like glassware shaking on a table in an earthquake (and a hint of the Jeux—and maybe even a sidelong wink at Ravel’s Jeux d’eau). Robson used the track to enhance those hints and echoes, effectively creating a sense of spatial zones—foreground, middle-ground background.

The final ‘trio’ of fresh commissions brought us back to that familiar watery domain with Sarah Gibson’s Our eyes once watered (after the second ‘thirds’ étude), though there were plenty of fifths and octaves in this treatment, and ethereal gong and gamelan harmonics. Robert Gates’ Water Music was as richly arpeggiated and romantic as its 11^th étude template, evoking something of the Giverny nymphéas of Debussy’s visual contemporary, Monet. The evening came to a fitting climax with Vicki Ray’s brilliant update on the 12^th Étude, which was as much an hommage to Debussy’s 20^th (and in her capable hands, 21^st) century legacies as it was to Robson himself, by way of a ‘tour’ through some of the chords frequently ‘visited’ and clearly savored throughout Robson’s formidable 20^th century repertoire—from Stravinsky to Messiaen to Janáček (and probably Robson himself).

I’m guessing the audience felt pulled in many different directions by the close of this dazzling evening. The works commissioned did not necessarily break new ground—but through this Debussy-inflected perspective, we could see/hear the directions being contemplated in new music. Consider (trying to look at our dark place optimistically right now) that we’re in a place where we can hear Debussy’s (and I suppose Stravinsky’s and so many others’) influence in the contemporary pop world. The Études take us to a place where we can re-position ourselves—and proceed unhesitantly into a musical domain as infinitely mysterious and chromatic as the planet’s northern and southern-most magnetic fields, as the cosmos itself.

September 17, 2018
Ethereal Visions and Dangerous Liaisons: Adès and Cheng in concert at Zipper Hall

For many of us in Los Angeles glued to a screen as a ferociously hot Tuesday afternoon faded with an exhausted sigh into a still intolerably warm Tuesday evening, possibly toggling between one task and another as Venus commandingly wrested a second set win from her dearest rival, Serena, the idea of tearing ourselves away to shlep downtown to Zipper Hall – even for such a rare pairing as the composer and pianist Thomas Adès and the great pianist and exponent of contemporary music, Gloria Cheng – might have seemed a bit of an ordeal. It was – and it was answered by a piano concert on the order of a calendar Grand Slam.I was far from alone in making the trip: the hall was packed. It occurred to me around intermission that any number of attendees might have monitored the last moments of the Williams sisters’ quarter-final match from smart phones or satellite radio. But all of us were aware that something extraordinary might be in store for us. We were not disappointed.Adès, like many of the men in the audience, was in shirtsleeves – even in the well air-conditioned auditorium, we were all recovering from mild heat exhaustion – all in black. (The page-turners followed suit.) Cheng was elegant in a Grès-like wrap gown in black-and-white with the wrap making a fan of the bodice. The program began with Adès’ own two-piano arrangements of two of Conlon Nancarrow’s famous Studies for Player Piano – Nos. 6 and 7. It’s immediately apparent to anyone who has heard (or seen – e.g., on YouTube) any of these Studies that not even four hands at a single piano could conceivably replicate the player-piano performances. A few of the Studies that open with a slightly narrower tonal range and leisurely pace offer an opening to the pianist or pianists who wish to essay them – but not for long. They get complicated – and although four hands at two pianos make the task a bit more physically manageable, it’s no less complicated. No. 6 began with scales (Cheng) against a five-note ostinato (Adès), that was soon complicated both harmonically and rhythmically. The scales took on grace notes; note and chord progressions took on a rolling, barcarolle-like rhythm. Then came a fresh attack and the bass line took on a new purity. This was answered by the rich harmonics of upper-register chromaticism in Cheng’s part, with a ‘resolution’ (if you can really call it that) of chords progressing up and down the keyboards.The second Study was more contrapuntal, almost a contentious articulation of the separate piano parts, yet with an immense purity throughout. Here the counterpoint of ascending and descending scale figures became a double-counterpoint with the rhythmic syncopation between the parts. A jazz-inflected section climaxed the ‘development,’ which then gave way to the ‘syncopation’ of staggered sequences – one noted the eighth rest ‘breaths’ – eliding into seven-note figures that culminated in a pyrotechnical frenzy, with the pyrotechnics more or less equally distributed between Adès and Cheng.Adès then took an adjoining bench beside Cheng for the 1950 Sonatina for piano four-hands by György Ligeti. The sonatina takes a form that might almost be called appropriationist in the visual arts, as if making an ornament or a few closing notes into the main figure or subject (in the upper register), with harmony and rhythm hammered out insistently in the bass. It has a scherzo or even humoreske quality, as if Satie were scoring a silent Western; but its charm should not be underestimated. The andante second movement is similarly reduced to its barest bones – a series of chord inversions, parallel four-cornered figures, climbing into the upper register as if to answer the steady four chord lower register drone; only to resolve finally in the insistent bass-line chords. The sonatina closes with another fast-and-furious movement, again with swiftly hammered four-chord motives in close harmonies, with sharp attack on the first notes, building subtly to a gallop, but closing with a kind of bird’s-eye resolution in the upper register rather than a ‘ride into the sunset.The two pianists then changed places again for Adès’ two-piano arrangement of his own Concert Paraphrase on Powder Her Face. There was a bit of suspense in the hall for this – I almost felt the piano-switch maneuver was to make us catch our breath a bit before what is, after all, an opera played out on a (two-)piano stage. For those of us who lapped up the scandals of ‘Marg-Arg,’ as the Duchess of Argyll was frequently referred to in the press, the opera seemed as inevitable and irresistible as the Marc caricatures of her we would see in the Tatler. It took Adès (with Philip Hensher) to bring it to life – and what a life! The Paraphrase is a distillation as much as a compression of the operatic setting (hard to think of compressing such a life even into a relatively compact ‘chamber’ opera), but as such brilliantly captures its underlying concept and principal motives: the Duchess attending with some elaboration to what she (and some fairly consequential figures of her society) regarded as her principal assets – the primping, powdering and perfuming of her beauty; the pandering of her sex. The opera was fairly notorious for replaying one of the Duchess’s most notorious scandals: her, uh, double-disappearing-head dalliance with the Minister of Defense (an affair that triggered her divorce from the Duke and steady decline).Cheng and Adès crashed right into it – the beginning passages evoking great Stravinsky dissonant statements. Adès seemed to be conducting himself (and Cheng?) at the piano as well he might – hard to call the sound orchestral, but it was certainly dense and rich. Adès has a marvelous way of juxtaposing declamatory lines against louche rhythms and lush harmonies and they were richly displayed this evening. The Paraphrase is packed with musical incident: tango rhythms and music hall cacophony contend with the high drama of arias. Rachmaninov-like chromatics elevate (or simply exaggerate) the high camp gesture. Staccato passages and what sound like fragments of romantic songs commingle with alternately supine sustains and nervous pacing in what could be a film score of this well-‘powdered’ life. Adès and Cheng worked through this with breath-taking precision evident throughout, but emphatic in such passages as those staggered lines leading to a penultimate largo that itself gives way to a shimmering chromatic fade-out – as if processing the Duchess across a bridge of sighsJust halfway through the evening’s program, most of the audience were in full acknowledgment of the extraordinary event they were witnessing. For certain pianists, the first half of the program would have made a pretty full evening. You couldn’t really call it a warm-up – but the performance of Olivier Messiaen’s 1943 seven-part Visions de l’amen was to take us all into the stratosphere. It is said that the central four-note motive of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was inspired by a birdsong; and Messiaen was never less inspired by birds than here. But there are also carillon bells (you hear this especially in the first section); gamelan tones; and an insistent sentinel-like repeated note reminiscent of the ‘Gibet’ section of Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit. The scope of Messiaen’s program here is almost jaw-dropping, moving from the clangorous bass and treble chords de la création, to the oblique harmonies moving in slightly skewed parallel to each other of les étoiles, etc. to the emphatic dissonances and repeated chords of l’agonie de Jésu, and finally through passages that evoke a ballet of jugement (which, in its Petrouchka-like complexity made an ironic foil for the earlier opera) and consommation, closing in ethereal, proto-minimalist passages that return us to the domain of les oiseaux. I concede here that it is impossible to do justice to a concert and peformances of such magnificence in a blog post (and can only pray that it was being recorded); but as ballets go, Adès and Cheng’s sacred and profane pas de deux took us all straight to the stars.

September 10, 2015

Tag: Olivier Messiaen

L’heure bleue at the Villa Aurora: Mark Robson —The Debussy Project

Ethereal Visions and Dangerous Liaisons: Adès and Cheng in concert at Zipper Hall