Having previously been conductor with Frankfurt's Ensemble Modern, Ingo Metzmacher has been at the helm with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin since 2007. In this position he has won praise for his programming of contemporary works alongside the usual classical repertoire, bringing quality contemporary music to a wider audience.
Tonight's concert in this regard was no exception, seeing two works by the Canadian composer Claude Vivier alongside two favourites by Mozart. Remarking in both composers a distinctive sense for the beautiful in music, the aim of the meeting was, one guesses, to witness what might be revealed of each composer by juxtaposing them with the other.
As have many people, I've attended concerts along similarly conceived lines before. A similar two-plus-two in Paris last year, for example, saw the works of Grisey and Rameau flung into each other's orbit. The idea was that the two Frenchmen, although separated by two centuries, were really quite alike after all, kindred spirits perhaps – both 'composer-theorists' whose works bore out innovative ideas regarding the nature of acoustics, the insistence of the harmonic spectrum, and so on.
What struck me then, and which struck me again here, was, despite a connect-the-dots 'likeness' between the composers on paper – or rather a near fit in the way in which we like to think of them – how utterly different the respective music in question is, different in a way that brooks no comparison.
Maybe this is in itself a useful aspect of the programming, though opposite to the intended effect. By the bringing together of these composers' music, we get to see how, paradoxically, there is no comparison, and not much relation, between their respective languages. The question of how certain contemporary harmonic languages are related to those harmonic languages of the past, and of the common practice era in particular, is a vexed one, and is less easily surmounted than our desire for a tidy analogy might suggest.
One concrete, albeit non-musical way in which Vivier and Mozart are related is, morbidly, in their sharing a premature demise. Both died at the still-young age of thirty-five, though Mozart's corpus was by the time of his death, of course, more voluminous than that of the Canadian.
Vivier was born in Montreal in 1948. After what appears to have been an unhappy childhood, his peregrinations took him as far as Cologne and to the feet of Stockhausen, with whom he studied in the early seventies. At this time he also became associated with the Feedback Studios group, and composers such as Clarence Barlow. Later in the decade, after coming to enjoy some success in his native Canada, he made the acquaintance of Grisey and the other spectral composers in Paris, whose ideas he shared regarding the use of harmonic spectra as models for ensemble and orchestral harmony.
Indeed, he might be said to have stolen a march on Grisey et
al by successfully integrating those innovative harmonic ideas with a writing
that makes use of distinct, exquisite melody, something that would take Grisey and his compatriots longer to do. All of which adds to the tragedy of Vivier's untimely murder in Paris in 1983, an event foreshadowed in his last work, 'Crois-tu en l’immortalité de l’âme?'
The two works performed here were 'Orion' and 'Zipangu', both from the last few years of Vivier's life. They were given good performances by the orchestra, Metzmacher's nuanced understanding of the music bringing the best out of the forces to hand. 'Orion' in particular stood out as a captivating work to witness live. Starting with a lone trumpet, the piece gradually expands to involve the whole orchestra, moving towards vivifying spectral harmonies.
The exoticism of the resonant percussion, which features from midway onwards, here brought to mind Messaien, as did the horns; and the trumpet has something of the aspect of Ives' 'The Unanswered Question'. Towards the end, one of the violinists stands up and shouts into a hanging drum, entirely fitting with the mysterious, ritualistic feel of the whole.
A less immediately appealing work, 'Zipangu' is scored for strings only, moving in its form from consonant to dissonant harmony and back again, monorhythmic lines cutting across the strings, which are divided into two groups, to a backing of shrill drones. Metzmacher's reading had a low-key feel to it, in contrast to a harsher and more biting reading I've heard before.
And what of Mozart? Reliably excellent, of course, and not a lot more to be said. The 'Jupiter' Symphony brought dynamic swells out of the orchestra, with Metzmacher shadow-boxing the players (really) and skipping his heels on the platform. The orchestra had been joined earlier in the evening by Daniel Hope on violin and Nobuko Imai on viola, for the Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat K. 364. This perhaps lesser-heard piece, dating from Mozart's immediate pre-Vienna years, is quite beautiful, and the performance by the soloists was well-judged and vocalistic, in particular the cadenzas of the first two movements.
By Liam Cagney
Photo credits: Ingo Metzmacher from DSO website
Related articles:
CD review: Metzmacher and the Vienna Philharmonic in Messiaen (0012742KAI)
Opera review: Metzmacher conducts Stravinksy at the ROH
CD review: Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante K.364 (Pentatone PTC 5186 098)