{"id":1621,"date":"2018-06-06T07:57:49","date_gmt":"2018-06-06T07:57:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/viaf.org.mt\/?p=1621"},"modified":"2020-11-08T08:00:02","modified_gmt":"2020-11-08T08:00:02","slug":"a-stunning-open-to-viaf-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/viaf.org.mt\/a-stunning-open-to-viaf-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"A stunning open to VIAF 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Anticipation and expectation were high; the emotional register even higher. A packed Basilica, an inspired Malta Philharmonic Orchestra <\/em>led by Marcelline Agius, <\/em>soprano Miriam Cauchi in top form, the Laudate Pueri Choir<\/em> of St George\u2019s Basilica rising to unparalleled heights, and a wonderful Philip Walsh putting it all together and delivering the goods. This was the opening concert of this year\u2019s 21st edition of the Victoria International Arts Festival<\/em> which is being held in honour of its mastermind, Mro Joseph Vella who passed away suddenly over three months ago. The void he left is incalculable and so is the debt we all owe him. In such dire circumstances the only thing the performers could do collectively was play and sing, perform music he championed, regale an enthusiastic public with glorious sound. That\u2019s exactly what happened on Wednesday 6 June 2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n British conductor Philip Walsh performed eloquently and beautifully. His is an understated style that is pregnant with emotion yet always controlled and contained in the most impeccable rational manner. Stepping in to take over from Joseph Vella at a very late stage in the planning of the opening concert programme, he was a wonder to work with, insisting on keeping the works already scheduled by Joseph Vella and filling in the rest of the programme with two glorious pieces that were like fitting bookends both thematically and in spirit with Richard Strauss\u2019 Four Last Songs<\/em> and Vella\u2019s own Domine Jesu Christe.<\/em> His was a commanding, authoritative but quiet presence that spoke volumes with the minimum of words. It was both an extraordinary and a humbling performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The concert opened with the beautiful Overture to H\u00e4nsel und Gretel<\/em> by Humperdinck. Like most inspired works, the genesis of this opera was unusual and more than a little fortuitous. Humperdinck\u2019s sister wanted to put on a show for a family children\u2019s party and hit on the idea of dramatising the Grimm Brothers\u2019 tale of H\u00e4nsel and Gretel. She asked her brother if he would write a little music for her project, and he happily agreed. The entertainment went off so well that the composer decided to expand what he had written into a three-act opera.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Humperdinck was also fortunate that he sent the completed score to Richard Strauss, who immediately recognised its excellence. Strauss conducted the work\u2019s premiere, and it vaulted instantly into fame; within a year there was scarcely an opera house in the entire German-speaking world that had not performed it. The opera was also produced in English in London, and the English company took their production across the Atlantic to New York as early as October 1895.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Technically, the work is an intriguing construction according to Wagnerian music drama principles. There are plenty of harmonic and orchestral devices inspired by Wagner, yet H\u00e4nsel und Gretel<\/em> does not make an impression of being at all Wagnerian in terms of solemnity, seriousness, or excessive length. The familiar tale fits well with the musical universe originally developed by the colossus of the Ring<\/em> cycle to represent a supernatural world. Although the story is elaborated with a few additional characters, it is clearly comprehensible even to young people with no prior exposure to opera.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Overture is written in the traditional grand gesture of German Romanticism: big yet structured, passionate yet controlled. The Apollonian and the Dionysian are in equitable balance. Humperdinck characterised this Overture as \u2018Children\u2019s Life\u2019, demonstrating these elements with dance tunes which are both urbane and toy-like. These are intertwined with references to the solemn \u2018Evening Hymn\u2019 melody heard on the marvellous MPO horns at the very opening, which made strategically-placed leitmotivic appearances throughout the opera, suggesting the protective influence of divine providence, so integral to fairy tales. The music opened with burnished tones dressed in Wagnerian garb, soon followed by warm commentary from strings and eventually the winds. A quicker-paced episode followed, suggesting childhood frivolity. A new strings-led lyrical section ensued, itself alternating with bouncy material before the opening chorale-like fanfare made a brief reappearance. Energetic passages intervened between lyrical episodes. Like many preludes (or overtures), songs and dance music from the opera supplied the rich thematic material.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The following work performed was Richard Strauss\u2019 iconic Four Last Songs<\/em> so beautifully interpreted by soprano Miriam Cauchi. A veritable tour de force this is a make or break work, making huge demands on both orchestra and singer \u2013 technically and dynamically. Soaring heights and plunging depths are the rule of thumb and it takes both technical aptitude and emotional maturity to carry it off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While other composers tortured themselves with the problems of life and death, Richard Strauss freed himself from all mystic and metaphysical ties and proceeded to utilise everything the century had produced in a technical synthesis, thus becoming the greatest virtuoso and technician of the declining century. With Vier letzte Lieder<\/em>, the quality of time changes: music expresses the feelings caused by a stroke of fate, awakened by certain experiences, for feelings are the sum total of man\u2019s life. Yet, for Strauss, man\u2019s multifarious feelings lend themselves to few typical formulations. If the tremendous power of the first song, Fr\u00fchling (Spring)<\/em>, is that it is able to convey the idea of all things, unrestricted by the images to which all the other arts are bound, it is conversely true that it is not within its power to transform the idea into a concrete and comprehensible phenomenon. Miriam Cauchi took to this work like a fish to water. She engaged with it impressively, infusing it with the perfect does of emotion yet always couched within the framework of a clarity of thought so relevant to Strauss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Composed in 1948 but not conceived of by the composer as a cycle, this magnificent, veritably powerful song cycle for soprano and orchestra attests not only to the greatness of Richard Strauss but is also a testament to what Adorno calls the \u201clate style\u201d. This is the composer expressing his genius at the end of his life; genius threatened by death \u2014 yet, it is the very work that transcends this threat and overcomes it by the potency of its beauty. The form here is not a product of the musical language; the language generates only fragments, and the larger form actually employed (the cycle as opposed to the individual song) is alien to the language. This contradiction between form and language leads in turn to another consequence of the stylistic transformation, namely, that a division between internal and external components replaces a series of internal divisions as the semiotic foundation of musical expression. Style here has no internal limits; where dissonance is the norm, consonance becomes an expressive device, but always, in music of this type, as an untimely sonority. This idea seems to establish a kind of law for music of Strauss\u2019 period, namely, that the familiar is always destabilising, while the stable elements are always estranged. Coherence and shape are at odds: the former, the unity of the piece, comes from the modern style, most often from the dense texture of microscopic motifs that permeate the whole, while the latter, the expressive totality, comes from the larger units such as melody and structure that are borrowed wholesale from the past. From this permanent division arises the unstably ironic or elegiac character, so typical of Laforgue\u2019s Pierrot lunaire <\/em>cycle of poems, which seems inescapable in the period: the music always seems to be saying one thing but meaning another, or to be pointing towards a position it does not really occupy. Yet, the irony rarely seems to arise from the kind of firm ground that supports the puns of Haydn or the parody so frequent in late Beethoven. The great music of Strauss hardly ever has the pronounced and unmistakable ideological character found in the music of powerful revolutionary composers such as Beethoven or Wagner, or of formidable consolidators such as Haydn or Brahms. It has no home base; the very key relationships that signal abnormality in Schubert or Chopin and madness in Smetana becomes unremarkable after 1920, and can be found in works such as Kod\u00e1ly\u2019s Cello Sonata<\/em> op 4, Ravel\u2019s Sonata for Violin and Cello<\/em>, and Strauss\u2019 Four Last Songs<\/em> \u2013 in order to undermine the stability of the tonal system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As one song eased into the next, the discerning listener heard that Strauss\u2019 \u201clate style\u201d is one of ecstatic finality that becomes largely affirmative, unlike the late style of Beethoven, whose mixture of conventionality and soaring sublimity is too unsettling to feel cosy. September<\/em> came across as a kind of autumnal, summational statement, which is also discernible in the Oboe Concerto<\/em> and in the Ovidian Metamorphoses<\/em>, a statement that does not point outward. It seems to be too late for that, or so the listener is led to think. It does not suggest what the music under- or mis-interprets in the programme or text, and it does not leave one with the impression of a mismatch or incongruity of any sort. It is inward looking, suffused with the type of beauty that only maturity can bring about. On the contrary, the seemingly antithetical despairing radiance of September<\/em>, which is carried over into Beim Schlafengehen (When Falling Asleep)<\/em>, is all under control. It is stripped of self-conscious flourishes; it is austere in spirit and luxurious in effect. In this particular song, the soprano\u2019s vocal intensity and equally magnificent beauty rose above the terrible unease that the displaced rhythms and disconnected tonal relationships could well bring about. Hers is an easeful voice, of singular beauty and malleability, equal and even in tone whether she is singing in the upper of the lower reaches of the vocal spectrum. More relevantly to this work, the emotional power that Miriam\u2019s voice carries reached out to a spell-bound audience, a power that is equally intense in the forte passages as in the piano.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Im Abendrot (At Sunset)<\/em> synthesises this disturbing paradox inherent in Beim Schlafengehen<\/em>. With a text by Joseph von Eichendorff (the other three are by Hermann Hesse) this song is literally elegiac, it is literally a \u201clate\u201d style (At Sunset<\/em>), but in fact it opens out at the very end with a quizzical doubt about the actual reality of ending \u2013 \u201cCan this perhaps be death?\u201d \u2013 suggesting that it might not be. The orchestral postlude rests on one of Strauss\u2019 favourite devices, namely, a melodic elaboration above a sustained a 6\/4 pedal chord. This is a deliberately prolonged and delayed suspension of the conventional ending. Even when he is concluding, Strauss lingers, moves, side-steps, and asks for a little longer. This is his own eccentric contribution to the modernist movement: not to conclude even when there is nothing further to say, almost anticipating Blanchot. Here, silence is not as simple as saying nothing; not to stop teasing out, as it were, from natural harmony the implications of an already exhausted medium; not to resist ignoring the historical situation of his music while at the same time staging and re-staging its anachronistic persistence. It is a performance obsessively rehearsed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n