The crowd pleaser at yesterday evening's concert at Carnegie Hall was inarguably Ligeti's Mysteries of the Macabre, an excerpt from the composer's 1977 opera Le grand macabre. The short (nine minute) piece has a curious history - it was originally arranged by Elgar Howarth for trumpet and piano and later rearranged as an ensemble for fourteen soloists. The performance last evening for full orchestra, though, returned to the Ligeti's orginal scoring. I had seen this piece performed in 2010 by the ACJW Ensemble and once again found the onstage histrionics between soprano and conductor enjoyable even if the novelty had somewhat worn off. If nothing else, the aria is one of the few twentieth century compositions capable of bringing an audience to its feet in wild applause. Both conductor Rattle and soprano Barbara Hannigan were exellent in their respective roles.
For me, the highlight of the concert was Berg's suite taken from his opera Wozzeck, his masterpiece of naturalism that ends with the despairing cry Wir arme Leut! ("We poor people!"). Too little credit has been given to Berg for his brilliance in composing operas, Wozzeck and Lulu both, that while atonal in structure were also among the most accessible of those written in the last century. The emphasis Berg placed on composing operas with wide popular appeal may have resulted from the trauma he had experienced when his Five Songs on Picture Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg received such a harsh reception, actually causing a riot, at the famous 1912 Skandalkonzert conducted by Schoenberg.
The concert began with Webern's Passacaglia, Op. 1, a piece described by his teacher Schoenberg as the composer's "journeyman's work." The final piece in the program was Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, Op. 68, the Pastoral. Performances of both compositions were respectable if not inspiring.
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