Sit’s hard to imagine that this pianist’s playing could leave anyone unmoved. Bertrand Chamayou performed twentieth-century works in the Philharmonie’s Chamber Music Hall (it was almost sold out) and was acclaimed for doing so as if he had presented something much more popular. The French pianist’s approach is irresistible: the naturalness, the lightness, the virtuosity, the unaffected. The repertoire of the evening appears to be completely self-evident: Luciano Berio’s “Cinque variazioni”, which are close to serialism and become sparkling jewels in Chamayou’s hands, with a blazing color intensity; Olivier Messiaen’s “Cantéyodjayâ”, a piece whose circular rhythm and strophic structure he reveals with a tightening hand; John Cage’s “Daughters of the Lonesome Isle” for prepared piano: With incredulous amazement one hears how Cage imitates the sounds of a complete gamelan orchestra with gongs, bells, flutes and howling string instruments – a grandiose gimmick; in stark contrast to this is Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s sonata “27. April 1945” with its violently erupting expressive music.
And finally György Ligeti’s “Musica ricercata”, eleven pieces in which the thirty-year-old Ligeti (then still living in Budapest) sets out to find new paths between inspiration from the folk music of his country and experiments of a quasi-scientific nature: in the first piece Ligeti only uses a single tone, in the second the second step is added. Even the early pieces show that one can listen to Ligeti’s music as it gradually grows.
Chamayou presents a range that makes you wonder whether such a variety can actually still be found in today’s contemporary music. This makes the French pianist one of the few artists who can do justice to the broad festival theme at the new Berlin Philharmonic Biennale. In its first edition, the festival is dedicated to the music of the “50s and 60s”, György Ligeti (he would have turned 100 this year) is the focus, but does not make it to the title of the festival. Fear that the name might put off potential audiences? The program of around twenty events is as committed as it strives to involve the entire Berlin Kulturforum with the State Library and the New State Gallery in concerts ranging from orchestral to solo performances, with readings, courses and an academic symposium – it does not appear particularly courageous. And anyone who hopes that the festival theme, which covers the entire range of barns, will claim to be almost complete will be disappointed. Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, the two top dogs in the musical life of those years, don’t even appear at the festival. In the case of Boulez, one held back in view of his hundredth birthday in two years, says the director of the Berlin Philharmonic, Andrea Zietzschmann, in an interview with the FAZ. Instead, one is happy to be able to present loners of those years, Boris Blacher for example. The online magazine VAN pointedly criticized the fact that not a single female composer appeared in the festival programme.
Kirill Petrenko, the orchestra’s chief conductor, and his predecessor Sir Simon Rattle were each supposed to perform with the Berlin Philharmonic, but canceled their appearances for health reasons. Daniel Harding took over the opening concert for Petrenko. The originally planned premiere of a new work by Miroslav Srnka was postponed, Ligeti’s large orchestral pieces “Atmosphères” and “Lontano” were now joined by sea pieces by Claude Debussy (“Okeaniden”) to Benjamin Britten (“Four Sea Interludes”).
Thus Ligeti’s revolutionary orchestral works once again appeared in a drawer in which the composer did not like to see them classified: that of impressionistic music understood to support images. Stanley Kubrick had provoked this by using “Atmosphères” as film music in, among other things, “2001: A Space Odyssey”. And yet Ligeti’s music is so strong that it can hold its own against such a classification.
The complexity of the finely roughened tutti sound at the beginning of “Atmosphères”: you actually want to listen to it much longer than Ligeti allows, who now gradually begins to vary the sound structure. And as with “Lontano” a whole piece grows out of delicate interval frictions of the woodwinds, one thinks to oneself: This is what a school of listening looks like. Start with the simplest steps and gradually increase the complexity. This is the scientific, didactic side of Ligeti’s work, as it came to light in the early Musica ricercata.
It is also preserved in his late work, for example in the violin concerto from 1990, which the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin performed as a guest. Here Ligeti returns to the music of his younger years, takes up Hungarian folk music and also uses it himself: the wide melody from the seventh piece of the “Musica ricercata”, which Ligeti lets gyrate in the canon so dreamily lost, appears in the second movement of the violin concerto again. Augustin Hadelich as a soloist played with sincere melancholy and in the remaining movements did not owe a lust for the brilliant, virtuoso; Karina Canellakis steered the orchestra sensitively through the tonally highly differentiated score and then introduced a new point of comparison with Witold Lutosławski’s powerful “Concerto for Orchestra”: With what a fine blade Ligeti had proceeded in his works.
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