One can often—though by no means always— tell whether a concert is going to be good already from its set-up. It is not a plain matter of casting of star performers/conductors, though that never hurts. It is the hint of genuine musical collaboration, and the presence of fresh musical blood. If you take one look at the set-up of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society's latest concert at the Perelman Theatre, my meaning will be quite obvious. On the one hand you have the brilliant Leon Fleisher, who, refreshingly, is not a new-music specialist conductor. On the other, there is a collaboration between the contemporary music ensemble Networks for New Music and brand new talent picked from the student/recent alumni population of the world-famous Peabody Institute. There's something poetic in the thought that the younger collaborators in this project—David Kirkwood, Bonnie Lander and Diane-Scheming—all sing (tenor, soprano and mezzo, respectively).
The programme was also selected and balanced admiringly. Stravinsky's intensely valedictorian In Memoriam Dylan Thomas was quirkily placed at the very start, and played twice—a practice that is thankfully becoming more and more widespread among conductors of contemporary music, where often the emotional concentration is directly opposite to the length of the composition. The other good thing about playing difficult music twice is that the second performance is, almost unfailingly, better. Not that there was much to better in the intensely felt playing of the brass and string quartet; but tenor David Kirkwood certainly took more chances with his delivery the second time around, something that coloured his entire second performance with a quivery conviction that was not entirely there in his first attempt, and a clearer pitching wherever the instrumental parts were not doubling his material.
In Memoriam is a late piece by Stravinsky, and obviously so: it is a lament; but it is also formally both more intricate and more poised than his earlier music, with a forlorn, Bartòkian five-note motif haunting the entire fabric of the music. The following piece was a composition written by Hindemith in his late twenties. Besides the obvious appeal of hearing last words and 'first' words in close succession, what is clever about the programme choice is that it presents two composers in musical guises that are not commonly associated with them: Stravinsky won't generally feature on your mental playlist of intensely desolate, poignant musical utterances. Likewise, I always thought Hindemith unlikely to make it to my personal hit-list of wickedly electrifying modernism. After last night's performance of his Kammermusik No. 1, however, I have radically re-considered my assumption.
Leon Fleisher launched his ensemble into a tour de force that started from a Petrushka memory and went through a delightfully wonky foxtrot that seemed to have tumbled out of a René Clair movie soundtrack. The excellently delivered third movement arched us right back to In Memoriam, with its forlorn flute, clarinet and bassoon calling to one another through what feels like an insurmountable difference, spelled by the desolate, recurring tinkles of the glockenspiel. The last movement is the longest and most original, opening with a timbric mix that sent you on the edge of your seat: buzzing, roving figurations in the strings underpinned by a cartoonishly threatening ostinato in bottom-register piano octaves. Everyone is crazily busy in this movement, from the dazzlingly parallel-motion scales of the piano—played with blazing precision by Charles Brunswick, to the brutish fanfare interjections of the snare drum, to the manic buzzing of the strings to the tongue in cheek fox-trot melody in the trumpet, and just when you think it has all reached its saturation point, a siren-call snarls above the chaos, only to be wickedly cut off (and the movement with it) by two cursory woodblock knocks. A joy.
It is rare than you get more than one fun item per concert. Usually the audience has to atone for laughter with a deeply earnest follow-up. This concert was an exception although the type of fun was radically different: Fleisher ended the concert with the most bemusing part of the concert, the two Ligeti Aventures, both children of the 1960s. What is most bewildering about this piece is that it is both an earnest bit of avant-garde intellectual research and a phenomenal parody of the same thing. Ligeti calls for three singers and an instrumental ensemble of seven performers. He then proceeds to give the singers (here featuring Bonnie Lander, Diane Scheming and James Rogers) parts that are made entirely of vocal distortions and unorthodox feats: breathing, angry grunts, ludicrous chip-munk chattering, whining, cackle, sneer, you name it. All of it is unsemantic and thus, perfectly ridiculous.
But that is exactly the point. The three singers, held together magnificently by James Rogers' unselfconscious yet consummate vocal expressivity, 'sing' both to the conductor's baton and to one another, often breaking into cartoonish, nonsensical bickering amongst themselves. This is accompanied by sparse, percussive and cleverly timed instrumental entries. To listen to Aventures is to watch it, for the piece makes no real sense as a mere sound-object. You would, for instance, miss the percussionist in Nouvelles Aventures donning protective glasses and proceeding to slowly lift a tray full of glass-ware (to the audience's wild amusement, for they know what's coming) with one hand only to then smash its contents (right on Fleisher's cue, of course) into a large metal box: a violently noisy act that succeeds both in silencing the singers' bickering and in elicitng, after a pause, a brilliantly gormless 'ohh...' from the baritone.
It is rare that you will find yourself laughing-out-loud at music written in the twentieth-century, but this is partly because the programming is not imaginative enough. Leon Fleisher and his musicians set a precious example last night, one that lifted the hall above any preconceptions about both specific composers and the genre of 'contemporary music' (if you care to call music written from 1922-1965 contemporary, that is) at large.
Photo: Leon Fleisher
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