“Babbitt?” One of the punters at the All That Dust record label launch party looked incredulous. As well as issuing CDs, the label is releasing extra titles as download-only. The first two are stand-alone revivals of works for solo voice and tape, Milton Babbitt’s Philomel sung by label co-founder Juliet Fraser and Luigi Nono’s La fabbrica illuminata sung by Loré Lixenberg. Both pieces have been mastered in binaural stereo, particularly suited for headphone listening. It’s a low-key but highly significant start to the online series.
I used that word revival for several reasons. The musicians have been perceptive enough to notice that certain pieces, certain composers, get taken for granted and start slipping into obscurity, right under our noses. Babbitt is a composer who was appreciated just enough to be accepted as a great artist in his lifetime, but not understood well enough to attract sustained interest of a type that sheds new light on his music. There is the sense that due obligation to the artist has been fulfilled, leaving one free to move on. In the great 20th-century critic Stephen Potter’s terminology, Babbitt is not presently “OK”. For punters with an innate allegiance to the experimental, the minimal, the ‘downtown’, Babbitt was a convenient figurehead of the anathema and in that respect Philomel was the one piece of his for which they would make an exception.
I tried searching for a link online to back up that last statement and found Kyle Gann asserting that “Philomel exists only in one incarnation, and may not even be repeatable in performance, so intimately is it based on Bethany Beardslee’s voice.” Fraser’s new recording renders this opinion nonsensical. As with her somewhat controversial performance of Feldman’s Three Voices earlier this year, she remakes the piece in her own character, with an intimate vulnerability that can change with the slightest inflection to icy, judgemental distance.
While Nono is more “OK” than Babbitt right now, most attention seems to be focussed on each end of his career, particularly the open expanses of sound in his late work and the light they cast on his early serial compositions. La fabbrica illuminata dates from 1964, the same year as Philomel, when his incendiary music and politics were at their most confrontational. Once a defining characteristic of his work, it is now a side of Nono too often effaced (at least in the UK). As Fraser had examined Babbitt’s notes to reconstruct a performance score, Loré Lixenberg returned to Nono’s manuscript to prepare her interpretation of La fabbrica illuminata. Her flamboyant, declamatory style suits Nono’s political indignation well: a futurist burlesque held fast by righteous anger. The sleeve notes don’t go into detail about the binaural mastering but the 54-year old tape parts sound great here. (I’ve only heard the older version of the Nono by Carla Henius before, on a Wergo recording that seemed a bit lo-fi.) Two fine compositions liberated from their status of recorded relics and reinserted into a living tradition.
Morton Feldman does not need to be revived, especially not late Feldman, but smart and skilful interpretations keep on drawing up new ways of hearing what he has to say. This 75-minute CD release of his 1982 violin and piano duet For John Cage is played by Aisha Orazbayeva and All That Dust co-founder Mark Knoop. I’m not looking up how many recordings have been released of this piece and I don’t know which, if any, are considered particularly outstanding but this one is now my favourite, for distinctive reasons that will persist even if I hear other great interpretations*.
It’s more colourful that any interpretation I’ve heard, more so than most late Feldman. The notoriously unhurried pace of this music often comes with sombre playing attached, but Orazbayeva creates a narrow but perceptible dynamic range to complement the greater variation permitted in her attack. Paired with Knoop’s piano acting at times like a foil, at others like a goad, their interplay can seem almost sprightly at times – relatively speaking. When things fall away again, the feeling of loss is almost palpable, with the violin reduced to frail keening or cut off altogether by an abrupt piano cluster. A lament carries through the entirety of the piece, in various guises ranging from a baroque sighing to nasal folk-song. The bold characterisation in the playing here makes the latter stages of the piece sound even stranger, when alien, rising harmonies take over. The playing between the notes is so good that I hope they’re taking some interpretative liberties with the score; the kind that are routinely taken with old masterpieces from previous centuries. Informed deviation from the notation can bring you closer to the music as well as uninformed deviation can take you further away. “Play it like Death and the Maiden,” Feldman helpfully suggested once to a daunted string quartet. It’s about time.
[* Disclaimer: my experience of this piece is limited to hearing Darragh Morgan and Mary Dullea play it live once, the typically astringent Zukofksy/Oppens recording and The Hat Art One.]
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Luigi Nono, Milton Babbitt, Morton Feldman
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Principal Sound: Feldman and Nono in particular
Wednesday 21 February 2018
In the days when information was scarce, one of the few readily available recordings of Morton Feldman’s late work was the CD of Joan La Barbara singing Three Voices. It was an invaluable, but unusual, entry point. A rare example of Feldman working with tape – the only one outside of his experiments in the early 50s – and a long work for voice alone, with other small curiosities that set it apart from his other pieces of the time. Last weekend, the Principal Sound festival at St John’s Smith Square presented a chance to hear this strange music in a new way.
Having just written about the importance of seeing/hearing music performed live, Juliet Fraser’s performance of Three Voices was a perfect example of what can be gained from the concert experience. I haven’t heard Fraser’s recording of the piece from a couple of years ago, but her performance on Friday night showed this piece and Feldman’s musical qualities in general at their finest. Imperceptible shifts in shading to the voice(s) kept the music hovering in an ambiguous emotional space, between tender and cold, sensuous and forbidding. Fraser’s perceptive programme notes mentioned that she chose to disregard the score’s instruction against vibrato; this had the added effect of softening the edges of the notes, slightly blurring the distinction between the live voice and the ‘tombstoney’ loudspeakers at each side, inviting a connection to be made between them. Working, unusually, with such a ‘full’ sounding instrument as the human voice, Feldman’s constricted harmonies cause beatings and overtones to emerge between the voices – this was clarified somewhat by the spatial distinction across the stage, particularly when the three identical voices hocket back and forth on the same pitch.
It was a smartly-programmed concert. Feldman is the source of inspiration for the concert series, but the programme this year focused on Luigi Nono, particularly his late works, which share Feldman’s need for hushed expanses of time searching for a form. Each work contained an elegy or dedication of some sort, and the choice of Feldman’s work echoed Nono’s use of electronics and spatialisation of sound. The series began with Nono’s A Pierre. Dell’azzurro silenzio, inquietum: flute and clarinet hidden away in the upper reaches of the church, swathed in trailing streams of harmonic resonances and echoes that circled around the audience below.
Over the weekend I got to hear the Quatuor Bozzini play again, after hearing them play Jürg Frey so well in Huddersfield, years ago. Their rendering of Nono’s Fragmente – Stille, An Diotima was a telling contrast to the interpretation I heard the Arditti Quartet give ten years ago. In his late works, Nono contructs fragile webs of sound out of the most meagre of materials. Stark, unpolished, often rudimentary instrumental gestures, broken off from any phrasing or context. With Arditti, Nono’s quartet became a transcendence of musical refuse into thwarted lyricism. With Bozzini, it became more coherent, like remnants of an ancient culture that has endured the ravages of time, faded but still refulgent. The following afternoon, the Bozzini’s two violinists played the duet “Hay que caminar” soñando. Nono’s last piece remains one of my favourite works, for its miraculous capturing of sonorities in the same realm as his electroacoustic works, produced entirely through acoustic means. Clemens Merkel and Alissa Cheung’s use of bow pressure, placement and angles brought out colouration of the violins’ sound that rivalled the electronics heard on the first night.
I don’t want to run down a checklist of everything that happened, so I’ll just mention a few more things that stick in my head now. Hearing Exaudi premiere a new work for unaccompanied chorus by Linda Catlin Smith, getting to experience Aisha Orazbayeva and Mark Knoop playing Bryn Harrison’s Receiving the Approaching Memory live and relishing that it’s as labyrinthine for them as it is for us, the Bozzini Quartet playing something by Claudia Molitor that has finally made me start to pay attention and, conversely, something by the wonderful Aldo Clementi that I found, to my surprise and shame, dull.
