Grande Salle Pierre Boulez, Philharmonie, Paris
Takemitsu:
Toward
the Sea III
Chausson:
Poème
de l’amour et de la mer,
op.19
Zemlinsky:
Die
Seejungfrau
Michel Rousseau (alto flute)
Nicolas Tulliez (harp)
Marie-Nicole Lemieux (contralto)
Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France
Vasily Petrenko (conductor)
Paris’s now not-quite-so-new Philharmonie
remains a thing of wonder. The approach through the Parc de la Villette is a visual
feast, especially on a sunny evening such as I was afforded. Lighting works
magic after sunset too. If the public areas outside the hall still seem oddly
provisional – presumably they are – the hall itself, now named the Grande Salle
Pierre Boulez after the conscience of new music, remains also an acoustical wonder, a feast for the
ears. I could not help but think, not least after a recent visit to the
Barbican, how desperately London needs something similar – or, dare we hope,
better. From May in Paris to May in Downing Street remains, alas, a distance of
intergalactic proportions.
Although I had enjoyed my first visit, in October 2015, this concert proved the more consistently illuminating
musical experience. For one thing, I am not sure that I had heard any of the
three works in concert before. Takemitsu’s Toward
the Sea III, for alto flute and harp, made for an excellent opening piece: the
sort of programming touch, mixing solo, chamber, ensemble, and larger forces,
of which Boulez would have approved. Flute and harp could hardly be a more
Gallic combination, yet Takemitsu’s music is rarely quite what it initially
seems. This, then, was a garden of delights, not least the opening movement, ‘The
Night’, but not all gardens, not all Japanese gardens, are the same. Such music
tends to reward concentrated, enlightened listening – what music worth its salt
does not?! – such as was enabled both by these fine performances, from Michel
Rousseau and Nicolas Tulliez, and the fine acoustic. There was a sense of inheritance
from Debussy and Ravel, without in any sense being limited thereby. Shifting of
roles between the two instruments came to the fore in the second movement, ‘Moby
Dick’, played with twin flexibility and purpose: both necessary when finding
one’s way around a labyrinth, however esmall. The closing ‘Cape Cod’ followed,
so it seemed, consequentially, without one ever necessarily being able to
explain quite how. Silences proved pregnant, as telling as the notes. There was
no playing to the gallery here; neither music nor hall required it.
We remained with the sea
throughout the evening, Chausson’s Poème
de l’amour et de la mer our next port of call. Like each of the three pieces
heard this evening, Chausson’s work is, surely not coincidentally, in three
parts, a ravishing orchestral interlude between the two verse settings: ‘La
Fleur des eaux’ and ‘La Mort de l’amour’. Many in the audience were,
understandably, disappointed by the withdrawal of Anna Caterina Antonacci from
the concert. There was, however, little to regret in the performance we heard
from Marie-Nicole Lemieux. Indeed, her rich yet agile contralto offered its own
distinctive rewards, which one would have been a fool to spurn. (How often, in
any case, does one have the opportunity to hear a ‘true’ contralto?) Her way
with the words was impressed just as much as the richly upholstered tone on the
low notes.
Rousseau and Tulliez were now
joined by their colleagues from the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France
and Vasily Petrenko. I was struck – perhaps as an Englishman I would be – by
the opening phrase and its seeming affinity to Elgar. Tristan-esque harmonies made their mark, of course, so did the
Klingsor-like, fin-de-siècle
world of the ‘sauvage’ we both heard and embraced. Chamber music, as in
Wagner, proved to be much of the story too, Petrenko acting as much as enabler
as director, without shirking his responsibilities in the latter role where
necessary. Greater urgency in the third section marked out a fresh start:
related, yes, but also perhaps redolent of Nietzsche, in The Gay Science: ‘At long last the horizon appears free to us
again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out
again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge
is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has
never yet been such an ‘open sea’. Wagnerism knows no boundaries; nor should
it.
 |
| Image: Arnold Schönberg Center - Wien |
Zemlinsky would surely have
nodded assent to that, whether as composer or conductor. Petrenko’s reading of Die Seejungfrau
(‘The Little Mermaid’), after Hans Christian Andersen, at least equalled any recorded
performance I have heard – with the inestimable advantage, of course, of ‘liveness’.
When I hear it I cannot help but think of Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande, not least since both works received their
premieres in the same concert, the final, January 1905 outing for the
short-lived Vereinigung schaffender Tonkünstler (‘Society of Creative Musicians’). Neither is an
easy work to bring off, yet Petrenko seemed to me very much to have the measure
of Zemlinsky’s ‘fantasy in three movements for large orchestra’, especially its
very own motivic integrity: not entirely unlike Schoenberg’s, yet certainly not
merely to be assimilated to it.
Through that joint inheritance from Brahms and
Wagner, the three movements seemed quite naturally, even organically – however loaded
those terms may be – to emerge. Would it have mattered if it had been called a
symphony? Perhaps not. But it was better called, and performed as, something
else. The narrative was very
much its own, perhaps not entirely unlike another, more celebrated maritime
symphonic poem, by a composer hovering at the edges of the programme: Debussy. The
waves of La Mer certainly came involuntarily
to my mind at the opening of the second of the work’s three movements. Thinking
of the symphonic or tone poem as a genre, work and performance sounded not
un-Straussian at some points, yet never – quite rightly, I think – displayed
Strauss’s cynical and/or materialist delight in phantasmagoria for its own
sake. Zemlinsky, for better or worse, was simply too nice a man and composer
for that. He withdrew the work, for whatever reason, after that Musikverein
performance. Schoenberg, as ever, bore the violent brunt of the reaction. ‘Reviews were unusually violent,’ he would recall: ‘one
of the critics suggested to put me in an asylum and keep music paper out of my
reach’. Zemlinsky, however, deserved far more than indifference – as Schoenberg
and this evening’s excellent performers knew well.
