Germany Musikfest Berlin 2024 [2] – Schoenberg and Ives: Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano). Kammermusiksaal, Berlin, 2.9.2024 (MB)
Schoenberg – Three Piano Pieces, Op.11; Six Little Piano Pieces, Op.19; Five Piano Pieces, Op.23; Piano Pieces, Op.33a and Op.33b; Suite for Piano, Op.25
Ives – Piano Sonata No.2, ‘Concord, Mass., 1840-1860’ (1947 version)
For most pianists, to present the complete (non-posthumous) piano œuvre of Schoenberg or to perform Ives’s Concord Sonata would be enough for a tough yet rewarding recital. To offer both, in twin homage to composers whose 150th birthday is being celebrated this year, is by any standards a feat, let alone to do so in such searching and comprehending performances. But then, Pierre-Laurent Aimard has never been ‘most pianists’. Apparently, he had performed the complete Schoenberg in a single recital only once before, as a teenager, followed by the Hammerklavier Sonata.
Schoenberg’s piano music is not exactly absent from the recital hall, though the number of pianists who perform it is not great, and they tend to concentrate on the Op.11 Three Piano Pieces and the Op.19 Six Little Piano Pieces. One might have thought works that unquestionably changed the history of music – the Op.23 Five Piano Pieces including the first published twelve-note piece, and the Op.25 Suite both including Schoenberg’s first twelve-note composition and forming his first entirely twelve-note work – might be heard a little more often, but no. Once, one might have said they were more written about and read than heard; now, it is difficult even to make that claim. As for the two Op.33 pieces, this was, I think, the first time even I, as a Schoenbergian of reasonable enthusiasm and commitment, had heard them in concert. Given that Aimard also performed the Piano Concerto earlier this year (review here), might we hope for a recording of that with the solo œuvre? We are still far from spoiled for choice in either.
The first of the Op.11 Pieces registered with radical, far from arbitrary, freedom, indicative of many years’ internalisation. Here was a fantastical Schoenberg, affinities lying as much with Robert Schumann as with Brahms, though never to be pinned down to one particular ‘flavour’. Indeed, kaleidoscopic range, whether in dynamics or such reference, was not the least of this recital’s virtues. If this is ‘freely atonal’ music – one can register doubts concerning the label, whilst conceding it is unlikely either to be replaced or bettered – then perhaps this was also ‘freely atonal performance’. The opening of the second struck me as insisting less on remnants of D minor than often; that is, until it did. Somehow, that all-important figure insisted on its ostinato procedure as if all depended upon it, and in a way it did. Again, all seemed to be in motion, according to a distinctly Romantic sensibility that immediately extended beyond ‘mere’ Romanticism. The third piece was as furious and as capricious, and so much more in between, as anyone could hope for.
In the Op.19 Six Little Piano Pieces, thinner textures were immediately apparent; they could hardly fail to be. Likewise, Schoenberg at his most aphoristic. It was, though, his sheer single-mindedness that shone through the exquisite spinning of a near-single line, however much shadowed on either side (pitch) and other sides (other parameters). The sheer magical quality to the final chord of the second, the almost vocal eloquence of the third, and the darting will-o’-the-wisp movement of the fourth: none of it, for once, required great virtuosity, but it required the fiercest of musical intelligence, which is what we heard. A distinctly unsentimental reading of the sixth piece sounded recollections of the Mahlerian funeral bells; above all, here as elsewhere, it sounded as music, programme or no programme.
The Op.23 Pieces gained greatly from being heard in this context. One immediately sensed an impulse to constructivism, even – perhaps particularly – on such elusive foundations. Kinship to other Schoenberg music of a similar time, as well as to more ‘freely’ atonal predecessors – the still-more-seldom heard Four Orchestral Songs, Op.22, a case in point – was immediately apparent; so too were the reinvention and reintegration of polyphony. With Schoenberg, as with Bach, it is never either/or. Each piece sounded as a response to its predecessor, the second for instance as vehement as it was protean. Aimard less argued than demonstrated beyond doubt that this music mattered. The third was characterised by a splendidly Schoenbergian combination of obstinacy and whimsy; the fourth’s eloquence of utterance evoked Beethoven; and the fifth, of course, marked another bridge, to the twelve-note music to come, reminding us as much of its dancing, its smiling, and its open-heartedness, as its rigour.
If I was brought up sharply by the beginning of Op.33a, it was because I had been expecting the Suite. It was a nice jolt, as it was to return to the Suite for the conclusion of the first half: an invitation to listen differently. Schoenberg’s very particular mixture of expressionism and the Bauhaus glowered and glistened. In its successor, Op.33b, from two years later (1931), we seemed to hear an attempt to create a new centre, its abandonment, and a new freedom that resulted from both. In performance, as in work, music never went quite where one expected. One needed to listen — and that was good.
The Suite, Op.25, emerged as quite a reckoning with Bach: harmonic as much as in ‘style’. We all know, after all, that Schoenberg had little patience with ‘style’ as a would-be substitute for Idea; it was certainly Idea we heard – and felt – here. The white intensity of the ‘Präludium’ and its Bachian ambition set out a new world before us, enabling one to hear this music as never before and, again, above all as music. Schoenberg’s need to communicate and the sheer abundance of that communication came to the fore in the Gavotte’ and Musette that followed; so too did a sense of delight, even of fun, as well as that trademark, ever-productive obstinacy. The Intermezzo, here the work’s beating heart, attained a well-nigh Mahlerian intensity of utterance, without forsaking an equally characteristic sense of childlike delight. All the while, through the Menuett and Trio, to the Gigue, line and development were pursued as one, the latter signing off with an éclat to foreshadow and even to rival Boulez.
If one naturally heard passing resemblances, especially harmonic, with Schoenberg in Ives’s Sonata – there are, after all, only twelve notes in the chromatic scale – it was more the composer’s particular belief and integrity in his own inimitable utterance that characterised what we heard. Aimard’s eloquence and understanding as guide in turn enabled us as listeners to place greater confidence in our own listening — and thus to reap rewards in response. The beginning of the first movement, ‘Emerson’, had a proper sense of mapping out of space to come, even if it could only offer a foretaste at most. Familiar melodies came through, though here that did not really seem to be the point as perhaps it sometimes may have been later on. The multiplicity and obduracy already familiar from Schoenberg took on new guise of expression and form. Line is perhaps more difficult to trace here than in Schoenberg; it may again not even be the point. Being able to place such confidence in our guide to this most singular of divine comedies was nonetheless at least part of the battle. Moreover, for all the craggy masculinity of utterance, there was tenderness too, nowhere more so than at the close of this movement.
‘Hawthorn’ was possessed of a very different character, heard with an unmistakeable sense of release and propulsion. Clusters were magical, even Debussy-like, to be savoured almost in themselves, yet rigour and struggle ultimately remained the thing. The plain-spokenness of ‘The Alcotts’, building Romantic momentum in work and performance, and the newly enigmatic quality to ‘Thoreaux’, however different its material and implications would soon prove, seemed to speak of an almost Joycean musical universe, albeit one rooted in particular, unmistakeably American transcendentalism. Summation seems reductive; perhaps summa comes a little closer, if a little ‘foreign’. Then, inevitably, all turned again more wayward. Like Schoenberg, Ives can never be pinned down. Why, indeed, would anyone try?
Mark Berry