Germany Musikfest Berlin 2024 [1] – Ives, Stravinsky, and Debussy: Anna Prohaska (soprano), Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano). Kammermusiksaal, Berlin, 1.9.2024. (MB)
Ives – 25 songs from the collections 114 Songs and Eleven Songs
Stravinsky – Four Russian Songs; Three Songs from William Shakespeare: ‘Full Fadom Five’
Debussy – Prose lyriques
My visit to this year’s Musikfest Berlin began with a fascinating, brilliant recital from Anna Prohaska and Pierre-Laurent Aimard, weaving five selections of songs by Charles Ives, who like Arnold Schoenberg would be 150 this year, amongst a set apiece from Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy. There may be about 400 Ives songs to choose from, but the selections were anything but random, whether in themselves or in combination with the other works. I doubt many in the audience will have been familiar with more than a few, but they will surely have won a good few converts: just what an anniversary celebration is for.
The first Ives set, running into Stravinsky, offered songs of remembrance and autumn, the latter often being a time when minds turn to the former. Yet, just as memories are not always what one might expect, nor was the opening ‘Memories’, written when Ives was still a student at Yale. In two sections – what appear to all intents and purposes to be two separate songs – the first offered a seamless transition from pre-concert hubbub into recital, Aimard arriving on stage to put his music on the piano, declining applause, suddenly joined on the piano stool in a little coup de théâtre by Prohaska, the two launching into ‘We’re sitting in the opera house, the opera house, the opera house…’. Aimard’s own delivery of the line ‘Curtain!’ brought proceedings, as beautifully acted as sung by Prohaska, to a close, swiftly to be followed by a distinctly New England languor for the second section, ‘Rather Sad’.
Just when one thinks one might have begun to get to grips with Ives, if hardly to pin him down, he throws everything up in the air again, whether through the absorbing piano writing – very much Aimard’s thing – of ‘A Farewell to Land’, one line seemingly multiplying in a radical alternative to Schoenberg; the bracing, disquieting liberty of the night in ‘The “Incantation”’; or the tricky, jaunty, yet unerringly ‘true’ speech rhythm, captured by Prohaska to a tee, of ‘September’. Indeed, that sense of ‘truth’, ponderous, even portentous though it might sound, seemed to ring, well, true throughout, in Ives’s harmonies, the obstinacies of his rhythms, and much else.
It is perhaps more usual to hear Stravinsky’s Four Russian Songs for voice and instrumental ensemble, although frankly one is lucky ever to hear them in any form. I am not sure I have had the opportunity before in concert, likewise with ‘Full Fadom Five’ from the Three Songs from William Shakespeare. In the former, the voice in particular captured once more to a tee this world of Les Noces in miniature. The ease with which Prohaska summoned up the right ‘voice’ for each section of the recital made it all seem so easy, art concealing art, Aimard’s command of metre and its transformation equally fundamental to the performance’s success. A whole new world was brought into life with great personality, alongside and indeed dependent on accuracy and musicality. The late, serial Stravinsky, time-travelling as widely and wildly as ever, was represented by the Shakespeare song: another jewel combining Webern-like process with ghosts of another past, in this case that of English music. Intervallic and harmonic flashes of that world beguiled yet also warned, prior to the celebrated Tempest tolling: ‘Ding dong bell’.
That song was followed by Ives’s Shakespeare setting of the same text, ‘A Sea Dirge’ richly post-Romantic, for want of a better word, yet still admirably concise. Prohaska’s ‘Hark now’ haunted like a siren, recording an earlier recital and album of hers. Not for the first time, traces of Schoenberg also haunted proceedings, but it was Ives and no one else who set us truly along the path of contrasts between town and nature. ‘The Swimmers’ evoked worlds physical and metaphysical, culminating in a strikingly declamatory declaration that the protagonist was the sea’s master, not its slave. ‘Soliloquy’ proved increasingly expressionist, continuing that at least intermittent Schoenbergian thread. Modern life and its contrasts – alienation is more Mahler’s world – was the stuff in performance as well as text for ‘The New River’, followed by a poignant account of the Matthew Arnold setting, ‘West London’, unusually expansive in this company. The wry ‘Ann Street’ and ‘In the Alley’, the latter’s musical and verbal twist nicely – or naughtily – relished led us to a circus band full of surprises in the song of that name, seemingly aching to be staged and responding well to the soprano’s natural scenic gifts.
Following the interval, a more impressionist or at least Debussyan Ives evoked ‘Evening’, ‘Mists’ and, in between, the ‘Evidence’ of his own words, preparing the way for spellbinding performances of Debussy’s Proses lyriques. The post-Wagnerian harmonies of ‘De rêve’ breathed a different air, leading us by the hand into a kaleidoscopic dream world that emerged all the better for its clear-sightedness. The crepuscular tumult of ‘De grève’ and the Yniold-like shift (apparently without Pelléas’s catch) in the final ‘De soir’ offered further instances, as did ‘De fleurs’ in between, of subtle, imperceptible shaping, songs growing out of words and harmony, which in turn seemed to grow out of the shifting light they had themselves engendered.
Ives’s ‘Berceuse’ made for a nice bridge to the final set, its lack of perfume and striking straightforwardness – which is certainly not to say simplicity – announcing a different voice and path, one leading perhaps from childhood, through battle, and ultimately to the strange heaven of General Booth. ‘Tom Sails Away’ suggested a world somewhere, aptly, between the whimsical and the visionary, that sense of liminality carried through into the next-but-one ‘Slow March’, its quotation of the ‘Dead March’ from Handel’s Saul both comforting and jarring. The closing ‘General Booth Enters into Heaven’ one might call a scena in itself, were such Italianate ways not so alien to Ives. It seemed to capture the composer’s brazen individuality and individualism: complex and straightforward, familiar and strange, old and new. Like a Mahler symphony, it seemed to embrace everything, to be like as well as of the world. Aimard gave the last of his own vocal interjections here, ‘Hallelujah!’ Yet it was Prohaska’s question that lingered, unsettlingly: ‘Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?’
It was quite a climax, to be followed only by a taste of the soprano’s upcoming Musikfest concert with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, in which she will sing more Ives songs, this time orchestrated by Eberhard Kloke. ‘The Cage’ left us asking, quite properly: ‘Is life anything like that?’ If only it were.
Mark Berry