Remarkably accessible premieres and modern classics: Saarbrücken’s Musik im 21. Jahrhundert festival ended yesterday.
Closing applause for the SR festival. Its achievement: a concentrated look at Luciano Berio’s musical world over the past fifty years.
A little eccentricity was inevitable at the Saarbrücken festival. On Saturday, at composer Vinko Globokar’s request, percussionist Mircea Ardeleanu submerged several instruments in an aquarium. What did we learn? Some percussion instruments float; others sink. Either way, the acoustic effect is hardly worth mentioning.
Such entertaining but musically unproductive showmanship was the exception. Under Berio’s artistic direction, the festival focused on art itself. Established figures Boulez, Kurtág and Maderna—composers important to Berio’s development—were represented. The younger composers he invited also stayed within concert-hall music. No world music, no crossover with popular entertainment, no colourful “event”, but a concentrated look at the musical current that matters to Berio.
That concentration paid off. It allowed listeners to discover connecting threads in the past fifty years of music. One point of reference was Boulez’s Structures, performed with breathtaking perfection by piano duo Götz Grau and Andreas Schumacher. Boulez wrote it in 1951–52, when he wanted to rethink contemporary musical language. The result is theoretical music, barely musical, a crazy dripping of sound. How much “newer” it sounded than most of the more recent works! Even Boulez’s own Dialogue de l’ombre double, from 1984, for clarinet and tape, in which seemingly playful manipulation of spatially distributed loudspeakers produces almost ghostly effects—also excellently realised by Alain Damiens.
Naturally, Berio’s works occupied a central position. Particularly compelling was Circles, in which singer Salome Kammer impressed less through a brilliant voice than through intense stage presence and great musicality. The crowning finale was Berio’s Sinfonia with the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra and Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart. The composer’s presence on the podium was moving above all symbolically. As a conductor he was less impressive: too often he seemed to conduct inwardly, immersing himself in the music rather than shaping it. This hardly detracted from the performance, since the musicians were on form and the atmosphere was right. It was a successful conclusion to a festival that also served as Berio’s personal retrospective of his artistic life.
Broadly speaking, premieres fall into three categories: “well…”, “aha!” and “oh dear!” At this festival, “aha!” clearly predominated. There were no “oh dear!” moments—no works provoking opposition, aggression or ridicule. Not shallowness, but a certain agreeableness prevailed. A strained “well…” greeted Nora Elsa Ponte’s prize-winning Tracce, reviewed previously. Thereafter, everything was worth hearing.
Three miniatures received excellently performed premieres on Friday with Klangforum Wien and Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, all modestly scored and roundly, clearly fashioned. Above all, Jacopo Baboni Schilingi’s Il colore del rosso delighted the ears: a cheerful, even playful world in which dreamy woodwind passages alternate with forceful string interjections, recalling a concerto grosso.
Christoph Neidhöfer’s Ondes for voices and instruments convinced through its sonic imagination. Voices, noises and instrumental sounds fuse into delicate waves, imitate and mingle with one another, producing surprisingly exciting new sounds.
A stark contrast was Fabio Nieder’s meditative Im Kopf. Its scoring for voices and tubular bells suggests a church, the space for which it was originally conceived. Humming male voices form a circle, evoking Tibetan monasteries or Gregorian chant. The individual vocal lines join into a quiet flow, creating a captivating mood, alert yet otherworldly.
A similar inwardness characterises Nieder’s Baumszene, premiered at the closing concert by the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra under Manfred Schreier. Here too there is little movement or drama, more a lingering in a natural state, underpinned by wind-like sounds and harmonics. Again, listeners immerse themselves in another, deeper, more spiritual world turning more slowly. The greatest “aha!” in all the premieres, however, was their lightness.
In one respect, a little more of an “event” would have been welcome: contact between artists and audience. A festival should offer this opportunity. The panel discussion with Berio and other artists was becoming interesting when what nearly always happens once listeners warm up happened again: time ran out. Perhaps a meeting point after concerts would help, enabling a more informal gathering and a chance to ask any question—including this: the brown liquid Mircea Ardeleanu poured into his aquarium towards the end of the wet percussion piece—was it tea or coffee?
Wibke Bantelmann