I went on Thursday evening to Paul Hall to hear my first recital at Juilliard this season as the ACJW Ensemble, a fellowship program jointly sponsored by Juilliard and Carnegie Hall, performed a program of modern works by György Kurtág, Matthias Pintscher, and Schoenberg. The auditorium was filled for the occasion and almost every seat taken.
The evening began with Kurtág's Wind Quintet, Op. 2 (1959) performed by Beomjae Kim, flute, James Riggs, oboe, Stanislav Chernyshev, clarinet, Michael Zuber, bassoon, and Jenny Ney, horn. By the time this piece was written, Kurtág was a more experienced composer than the low opus number would indicate. He had already been writing for years music heavily influenced by Bartók to whose work he had been introduced early on by fellow composer Ligeti while the two were still students in Hungary. It was only in 1957 when he arrived in Paris, where he studied with Messiaen and Milhaud and was first exposed to the music of Webern, that Kurtág realized how limited his musical education had been. He experienced something of a crisis at that point as he came to realize that all his work up to then had been inauthentic. With the help of psychologist Marianne Stein, to whom he dedicated his Op. 1 string quartet, Kurtág made a new beginning. Upon his return to Budapest, he continued to follow his new found path. Though Soviet censorship in his home country was strict, Kurtág had less trouble conforming to its demands than had his friend Ligeti who was eventually forced to flee Hungary once and for all. One reason for this was that Kurtág's pieces were, by inclination as well as necessity, comparatively modest and low profile. Reminiscent of Webern's works, they were miniatures in which were compacted whole worlds of feeling. His Op. 2, played here, was a dense eight-movement work that shifted abruptly from one tempo to the next. So short were the movements that the ensemble actually repeated the first movement so the audience would better be able to absorb it.
The next work was Pintscher's Study II for Treatise on the Veil (2005) performed by Siwoo Kim, violin, Danny Kim, viola, and Michael Katz, cello. The work drew its inspiration from the two eponymous large scale abstract paintings by Cy Twombly that were completed in 1968 and 1970 and exemplified the artist's "grey-ground" period. (The second of these is coincidentally now on view at the Morgan Library through January 25th.) In speaking of the paintings, Pintscher described their impact on his musical work:
"My own Treatise cycle refers to this series of work, while also acting as an hommage to an artist I very much admire; an artist whose work heavily influenced the structural make-up of my very own compositions, especially in recent years... I often find myself wishing that I was able to draw directly onto the sound of the instruments like a painter…"
Interestingly, Twombly's paintings were themselves inspired by a musical work, The Veil of Orpheus (1953) by the French musique concrète composer Pierre Henry, a long recording of the sound of cloth being ripped apart. The tearing noise went on interminably and was intended by the composer as a representation of Orpheus's loss of Eurydice at the moment he disobeyed the gods' command and turned to look back upon her.
This performance of his string trio was actually coached by Pintscher who, among his other responsibilities, is a Juilliard faculty member. (He will also become this year the principal conductor of the Lucerne Festival Academy.) Before beginning the piece, violinist Siwoo Kim spoke briefly to the audience and explained that the composer had suggested to the players that their bowing should in a sense mimic the brushstrokes Twombly had used in creating his paintings. Kim also spoke of the influence the recently deceased Pierre Boulez had exerted upon Pintscher and then dedicated the performance to the memory of the late composer/conductor.
After intermission, the program ended with Schoenberg's best known work, Verklärte Nacht (1899), that avatar of Viennese fin de siècle decadence. It was performed very well by Kobi Malkin and Siwoo Kim, violins, Dana Kelley and Danny Kim, violas, and Michael Katz and Andrea Casarrubios, cellos. The sextet is a haunting setting for Richard Dehmel's verses, and a fine piece of music in its own right, but it has been so overplayed in recent years (it is also scheduled to be performed next week at Chamberfest) that it's now almost impossible to listen to it with equanimity. The work has become the Schoenberg for people who don't like Schoenberg (i.e., the twelve-tone technique). It's hard to believe now that this excursion in post-Wagnerian Romanticism could ever have been so controversial as to have been rejected by the Vienna Music Society for having been too innovative in its use of an inverted ninth chord. Not to mention what in those days was regarded as objectionable sexual content.
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