Since there's nothing quite like diving right back into the deep end, I resumed my nocturnal activities tonight with the New York premiere of Salvatore Sciarrino's Lohengrin, which was performed by actor-soprano Marianne Pousseur and the Alliance Chamber Players at Florence Gould Hall on Monday night. The concert was the third of four in violinist Nurit Pacht's ambitious series, "Wagner, Our Contemporary," which has examined the works and influence of Wagner in a variety of contexts and from several perspectives: Wagner and Nietzsche in the first concert, Wagner and his French followers in the second. Wagner as harbinger of the breakdown of conventional tonality in the 20th century is the subject of the fourth concert, to be held here on May 1.
Tonight's program, it could be argued -- and was, vociferously, by a small handful of disgruntled patrons after the performance -- actually had rather little to do with Wagner. Despite sharing a name, the only things Sciarrino's monodrama has in common with that other Lohengrin are an inspiration in a particular medieval German fable and the fact that each is a product of a composer with a gift for limning emotional states through canny orchestration. Otherwise, Sciarrino's music is a logical continuation of Webern, a landscape of flinty utterances, alarming squeals and langorous sighs rendered all the more alien by Sciarrino's reliance upon unorthodox methods of sound production. Dramatically, the work continues the line of Peter Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King and Miss Donnithorne's Maggot, in both of which mental disorder is depicted through fragmented lines and extreme vocal techniques.
Based upon 19th-century French poet Jules Laforgue's version of the Lohengrin tale, Sciarrino's work is termed by its composer as an "invisible action," in which the skeletal plot is advanced entirely as the feverish dreams and delusions of a clearly unstable Elsa. The music alternatingly depicts her circumstances and her state of mind. Soprano Pousseur -- daughter of Belgian avant-garde composer Henri Pousseur, and a veteran of Philippe Herreweghe's Collegium Vocale and Chapelle Royale who has performed and recorded with both Pierre Boulez and Kurt Masur -- delivered the role in a series of whispers, repetitions, gurgles, coughs and sighs, all highly amplified and occasionally treated electronically to provide more resonance. It takes an utterly fearless performer to gurgle saliva into a microphone; Pousseur, a favored interpreter of Sciarrino's works, managed the composer's demands with poise and conviction, while also proving a commanding actor through countenance and gesture. Her feverish performance utterly conveyed a personality at the point of utter breakdown. Even the simple melody Pousseur sang near the end of the piece was rendered strange and shocking through its context.
The Alliance Chamber Players, a freelance band conducted by Alarm Will Sound director Alan Pierson, admirably handled Sciarrino's outre demands, playing smeared lines, imprecise unisons and glinting tintinnabulations that further extended the composer's depiction of a mind on the verge of collapse. Flutists occasionally blew across disconnected segments of their instruments; an oboist played without reeds, while a percussionist elicited a glowering rumble by tapping on an amplified thunder sheet with his fingertips. A chorus of three male vocalists, called upon only for two isolated lines during the piece's three-quarters of an hour duration, seemed to be singing in drastically slow motion.
No doubt about it, the slurps, squeaks and groans that Sciarrino calls for in Lohengrin include some singularly unpleasant sounds. Even so, the way in which these unruly noises are wed and ordered to vividly depict mental abandon made for a hypnotic experience. Roughly half the audience seemed to approve, afforded Pousseur and players a rousing ovation. The others, well, they were the ones complaining out loud on the way out the door. As far as I was concerned, there were more than enough transcendent passages -- the thunderous cacophony that led to a queasy dawn music in Scene Three, to name but one -- to convince me that Sciarrino's Lohengrin, if not necessarily a masterpiece, is far more genuine vision than mere provocation.
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For anyone who might be wondering about my roller-coaster frenzy of the weekend past in Virginia, well, sadly, that didn't happen, thanks to the wet weather that consumed most of the eastern seaboard. Still, I'm certainly not complaining, because Saturday afternoon was filled instead by a visit to Richmond's Edgar Allan Poe Museum. This rich trove of Poe memorabilia is housed in Richmond's oldest surviving stone house, a building to which Poe apparently had no connection save for possibly having stood guard outside it one night during his Army cadet days. Even so, it's a well-organized collection of former family possessions and early printings of Poe's works, and includes a morbidly fascinating room devoted to supposed causes of the writer's demise. If you've got an active imagination and you find yourself in Richmond, this is a must.
That night, the good Dr. LP, myself and a mutual friend attended a concert by the Richmond Symphony Orchestra -- mainly because violinist Jennifer Koh happened to be the guest soloist. Regular readers already know of my high regard for Koh, whose career has been somewhat bifurcated between new-music gigs here in New York and standard-repertoire performances elsewhere -- at least with regard to orchestral appearances. Here in Manhattan, I'd heard her play concertos by Ligeti and Zorn, but I had to go to Virginia to hear her in an utterly ravishing version of Max Bruch's Concerto in G minor. Unsurprisingly, Koh had no problem at all with the work's highest extremities and relentless double stops, but she also readily mustered the passionate lyricism this work requires. (New Yorkers will get a taste of this when Koh plays the Tchaikovsky concerto with the New York Philharmonic in Central Park this summer; before then, her Walter Reade Theater recital on May 7 includes music by Mozart, Schubert, Saint-Saëns and Augusta Read Thomas.)
Led by conductor Mark Russell Smith, who impressed with both introductory patter and refined stick technique, Richmond's resident ensemble offers a short season filled with impressively wide-ranging fare. Saturday night's concert opened with Michael Daugherty's Snap!, a 1987 showpiece that uses contrapuntally positioned crash-cymbal players to evoke the verve of James Cagney's tap-dancing in the 1937 film, Something to Sing About. This was performed with precision, although I thought the players might have shared more of Smith's visible ebullience. Regarding the closing rendition of Sibelius's Symphony No. 2, the Doctor and I were of mixed opinion. She felt that Smith's tempi were too broad to sustain a narrative line, given the composer's sparse thematic material. I agreed to a point, but admired the Brucknerian heft Smith found in the work's climaxes -- especially the finale, in which the small Richmond band was certainly aided by the resonant acoustic of the city's First Baptist Church, which made the orchestra sound twice its size.
Throughout the concert, and especially in an encore of the scherzo from Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream (which the Richmond Symphony presents in full this week, in conjunction with the Richmond Ballet and Virginia Opera), the orchestra's winds in particular proved an especially fine ensemble. The brasses were their equal in the Sibelius; all told, Richmond has a fine, flexible orchestra to be proud of.
Playlist:
Ihsahn - The Adversary (Candlelight)
Zyklon - Disintegrate (Candlelight)
Enslaved - Ruun (Candlelight)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - La clemenza di Tito - Alexandrina Pendatchanska, Bernarda Fink, Mark Padmore, RIAS Kammerchor, Freiburger Barockorchester / René Jacobs (Harmonia Mundi)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - La clemenza di Tito - Hillevi Martinpelto, Magdalena Kožená, Rainer Trost, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Chorus / Charles Mackerras (Deutsche Grammophon)
Leonard Bernstein - Symphonic Dances from West Side Story; Gabriela Lena Frank - Three Latin American Dances; Sergei Rachmaninoff - Symphonic Dances - Utah Symphony / Keith Lockhart (Reference Recordings)
Felix Mendelssohn - A Midsummer Night's Dream: Overture and Incidental Music - London Symphony Orchestra / Peter Maag (Decca)
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