Stumbling on melons

On Monday night to the Labeque Sisters, appearing as part of the SSO’s International Pianists in Recital series.

My friends from the Dulwich Hill gang, who usually come to this series, stayed away. Judging from the hall, others had stayed away including (or so it seemed to me) the usual SSO apparatchiky. Many others, however, had come. Apart from the empty seats below, the hall was packed (to coin a phrase) to the second tier. (This also included what seemed to me a slightly higher than usual lesbian turnout – that is, I saw a few lesbians known to me who I don’t usually see at these concerts or other concerts.)

I had thought of exchanging my ticket for another series: Avan Yu with the SSO in their Mozart series came to mind, but I was drawn to the first half, especially Debussy’s En blanc et noir, coupled with the 2-piano ur-version of Ravel’s Rapsodie Espagnole.

When I got to my seat, my neighbour told me the Debussy was “off,” replaced by Philip Glass’s Four Movement for Two Pianos. This had been announced by an insert in the program, which had eluded me, as I had brought my series program from home. The reason for the switch is unclear to me: the Debussy was played in Melbourne the week before.

This changed the balance of the program. I preferred the Ravel and I still would have preferred the Debussy but there was much that was admirable in the Glass.

The second half was a suite (if I can call it that: you might really call it “highlights” though “Officer Krupke” didn’t get a look-in, probably because that is a verbal rather than a musical highlight) from West Side Story with the addition of two percussionists. This attracted me less and was the reason for my initial reservations. I’ve seen K and M in their foot-stamping keyboard-pounding Jazzy mode and it is less interesting to me either musically – a bit like, in different ways, other manifestations of Euro[crossover]jazz such as Claude Bolling or Friedrich Gulda in his Jazz mode – or pianistically.

In her program notes, Yvonne Frindley boldly and I think pre-emptively claimed this was “music in the tradition of the nineteenth-century opera paraphrases.” I’m not so sure of that. For one thing, it was quite a lot longer. There is the question of paraphrase vs transcription. But ultimately I think it comes down to two matters – one a question of context and the other of format.

To take the first, paraphrases and transcriptions come from the era when it was a paraphrase or transcription or probably nothing. West Side Story has been recorded and filmed and propagated in that way.

Secondly, part of the point of the nineteenth century paraphrase was that the one artist would mould together his [sic] own version of a work for larger forces. This was one the one hand a feat, but also an act of artistic subjectivism. Of course, transcriptions and arrangements of popular theatrical works were also performed, but less, I think, as creatures of the concert hall (the Vienna society which performed works in reductions was a different and special case). I don’t think that you saw piano duet or duo performances in concerts: that was something you did at home. To me, ensemble arrangements are more in the tradition of Baden Baden or Karlsbad/Kalovy Vary than of the nineteenth-century opera paraphrases.

I’m not going to fault the playing. There were lots of nifty bits which I liked and even some quite beautiful bits – mostly the quieter parts. But as the arrangement went on, it was the concept which left me wondering: why am I sitting here listening to this medley?

Others have been more enthusiastic. Harriett Cunningham wrote in the SMH/Fairfax press:

The duo’s own version of Bernstein’s West Side Story took the performance to another level again…Percussionist Gonzalo Grau and drummer Raphael Seguinier were a grand match for the piano duo….

The Labeques were by turn ballerinas and boogie-woogie jazz pianists, ripping into the dangerous crush of Mambo and then picking out the central fugue in Cool with classical restraint. America, complete with flamenco hand clapping, foot stomping and box-slapping from Grau, was the show-stopping highlight, but by then the audience had given up on standard concert etiquette. They loved it, so they cheered.

That’s true. There was woman a few seats away from me who gave a cheer after every fast and loud number, and she was not alone. But that was not the only reaction.

Just after “Tonight,” an older gent a couple of rows in front of me, a fixture at this series, stood up and started walking down the aisle to the exit. As the audience’s inevitable applause (“Tonight” is loud and fast and the first act closer in the original) subsided, he spoke out. “Boo!” he declaimed, not uncivilly (unless you think a Boo itself uncivil) but definitely. “I don’t want to stay.” And he left.

I admired his courage.

Spring is here. I have it on an authoritative source. Never mind 1 September, the date commonly designated in Australia (though the anti-Antipodes – is that the Podes? – do not say the same for 1 March) as the beginning of Spring. Some time in the past week my local Woollies has reallocated to salads the shelf space previously assigned to prepared/refrigerated soups.

Yet in the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall on Saturday night, where I went to hear the SSO and Ingrid Fliter play Chopin’s Piano Concerto No 2 (actually, like Beethoven’s, his first) you could have sworn that it was deepest winter. “I thought we had eliminated TB in this country,” I heard a chap in the row behind me say as we went out for interval. It must be the tourists and, of course, boat people.

Mark Wigglesworth conducted.

The Concerto is a funny work: it is early Chopin and with the exception perhaps of the slow movement does not show so many signs of his fully developed style: the first movement is a lot of notes with only a few hints of things to come (the bassoon moments, for example, in this movement and elsewhere warmly played by Matthew Wilkie); I suppose the last movement prefigures the national dance elements but there is an awful lot of tonic-dominant vamping. What is mostly missing is the hidden inner tunes and more adventurous harmonies of his mature style.

At the first performance there was apparently some criticism that Chopin played too quietly. This was not a criticism which could be levelled against Fliter. The middle movement was the best but here the coughing was at its most chronic. Oddly enough, they were perfectly quiet in the encores which Fliter generously gave: the last movement of Beethoven’s “Tempest” sonata and Chopin’s so-called “Minute” Waltz. Why? It can only be because people were listening more attentively. Is that because the piano on its own is quieter? Is it because they perceive that the encore is more “special” and respond accordingly? What cannot entirely be ruled out is that Fliter’s rendition of the encores was itself more compelling. Probably once the coughing begins it sets off its own vicious circle: concentration and attentiveness by an audience is a game which everybody has to play.

Rant over.

The second half was the “The Ring: An Orchestral Adventure” arranged by Henk de Vlieger from Wagner. Peter McCallum in the SMH was rather snooty about this: what is the point of extracting merely one element from the Gesamtkunstwerk?

Rearranging any work of art is a bit like kicking a leg out from underneath a stool: the result is likely to be a little wobbly. For that matter, just doing opera in English suffers that risk; take away the scenery, take away the action, take away the singing, of course you don’t have what you had before.

Well, it is what it is.

I think it is reasonable to approach the “Adventure” as a “Reminiscence” or “Souvenir” in the Lisztian tradition: as with the Liszt transcriptions/reminiscences in his time, it is a means of hearing music which you otherwise would not hear – or, in this day and age, would not hear live. You have to bring your memory or knowledge of the original work to fill in the missing bits and to adjust the balance. That’s more than putting the voices back in, to speak only of the missing musical elements.

In cutting things back to about a 70=minute orchestral tone poem, de Vlieger inevitably brought the whole thing back to Wagner’s original concept of Siegfrieds Tod. The back story (the Ring Cycle is one enormous prequel) is inevitably pruned so as to give an emotional shape around the big moments in Götterdämmerung. We whizzed through Das Rheingold (the opening Rhine music, a bit of Nibelung stuff and then some Valhalla music, anachronistically using the Wagner tubas (not, I think, introduced by Wagner until later in the cycle). Die Walküre went straight to the ride of the Valkyries and a bit of Wotan’s farewell and some fire music; we got a bit more detail in Siegfried (forest murmurs, a snatch of woodbird, Siegfried’s horn call then on to Brunnhilde on the mountain top) and quite a lot more of Götterdämmerung.

The main problem with an orchestralisation of the Ring like this is that Wagner’s musical currency has been debased by its very success. Played in patched-together excerpts it inevitably sounds like movie music: movies with music are after all the true twentieth century post-Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk.

There’s not much you can do about that, and opportunities to see the operas in the flesh are rare and expensive.

The emotional heart of it for me was the passage which (I’m pretty sure) came from Siegfried’s narration where he unwittingly betrays himself. This leads up to his death – which was then followed pretty smartly by his funeral March and a truncated version of Brunnhilde’s peroration. Second place was the kind of slow movement from Siegfried where he thought about his mother. Otherwise, Siegmund, Sieglinde, the Norns, the other gods were all very much in the background.

The orchestral playing was not blemish-free: the celli in particular seemed to have a hard time cutting through and there were a few more horn fluffs than ideal (starting with the top note in the first Rhine music chordal build-up) but hey, that’s live performance. Perhaps they still need more time to really play into the style. There were plenty of exciting bits and also beautiful bits. The point was to think about where they came from and seek the mood and meaning which this related to. My only gripe is that it could have been longer: the thing you miss is the endurance excitement and cumulative effect of the real thing, but it’s hard to see how that can be reproduced consistently with a feasible abridgement.

I enjoyed it.