Saturday, September 7, 2024
Berliner Philharmonie, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße, Berlin
It was good to find Jonathan Nott back with the Berlin Philharmonic (together they contributed to Teldec’s “The Ligeti Project” some time ago). Nott (music director of the Suisse Romande and Tokyo Symphony orchestras, both his contracts recently extended) opened this concert with Orpheus Unbound (its composer in the audience), which, with a metronomic woodblock, begins like John Adams’s Short Ride, cueing a fifteen-minute piece more concerned with effects (especially glissandos) than content, unlike the late Péter Eötvös’s Cziffra Psodia (2020), here introduced by the composer:
“I gladly accepted the offer to write a piano concerto on the occasion of Georges Cziffra’s 100th birthday. My family had various personal connections to Georges Cziffra, and so I had the opportunity to get to know him when I was still a child. In the 1930s, my mother studied piano with him at the Academy of Music in Budapest. After his unsuccessful attempt to leave the country in the early 1950s, he worked as a construction worker in a forced labour camp, where he ruined his hand. After his release, my mother helped him to get to play a piano again at “afternoon concerts” in small cafés. In 1956, he and his family left Hungary for good and settled in Senlis near Paris, where he founded the Cziffra Foundation for young artists. Later he also held summer courses in Hungary, organised by my wife. Cziffra’s whole life was one of success and tragedy. It was rhapsodic and dramatic. This is precisely the atmosphere I have tried to create in my piano concerto. The characteristic metallic rhythm heard in the first movement is reminiscent of the work in the quarry during his imprisonment. The later meditative state of the moments of his withdrawal from the public has been composed in three quiet cadenzas. The entire work is based on a small melody consisting of the letters of Cziffra’s name, with the pitches corresponding to the letters forming the characteristic chords and scales. The French version of Cziffra’s name was appropriate for this: G-e-(o)-r-g-e-s (g, e, d, g, e, e-flat) and C-z-(i)-f-f-r-a (c, c#, f, f, d, a). The tempo of the piano concerto’s 4 movements is mainly based on the metronome marking of 100. An important element of the orchestration is the cimbalom, in remembrance of Cziffra’s father who played the instrument in cafés and even in Paris before the First World War. Each movement ends with a short violin solo. This is a personal tribute to the memory of Georges Cziffra’s talent and his rhapsodic life.“
The roughly twenty-five-minute Cziffra Psodia is incident-packed, pulsating at the outset, with much to relish, including the tangy tones of a cimbalom, and from there the invention is ear-grabbing and mercurial, brilliantly orchestrated in its variety. How any one moment relates to Cziffra as a person (there’s no doubting he was a great pianist) is difficult to say – one might suggest him as volatile, prone to flights of fancy, intensely nostalgic, and driven – but it’s more pertinent to hail Cziffra Psodia as an impressive opus by a now sadly late composer-conductor (this concert dedicated to his memory) given an obviously superb performance (so too the Mazzoli), Pierre-Laurent Aimard in scintillating form, and the Berliners equally virtuosic.
The Fourth Symphony of Charles Ives (1874-1954), composed over a decade and more from 1910, and not performed complete until 1965 (see below), is remarkable for its range of styles, if totally Americana, coming together, with the ‘Comedy’ second-movement showing Ives at his “most complex in its use of multimetrics and temporal dysynchronies”: hymns, marches, folk-tunes, advanced and popular/indigenous musics layered, competing for attention. Add in a choir (outer movements; firstly, “Watchman! tell us of the night”), different perspectives (such as four celestial violins on-high), and a huge orchestra. Aimard, placed centrally, returned to play the piano part (additionally, two further pianos are required) in Ives’s very personal take on what a Symphony can be – it might be thought to embrace the World in the Mahlerian sense. Nott (with the second conductor Gregor Mayrhofer located to his right) masterminded a wonderful performance, fearless in the second movement’s extremes, lucid too – I wonder what Boulez made of it in Paris with BBC forces (December 1, 1977) but I can testify to Ozawa and Boston in London, and Slatkin with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam – building to a sensational dissonant brouhaha that simply stops, riposted by a melody (fugally presented) that suggests a Sunday-morning church service. The final movement, involving the choir again, is a death-rattling march of funereal tread, Ives at his most visionary, implacably building to a grinding climax, then eerily fading, to what? Maybe for us, a nuclear winter. This was thirty-five minutes of magnetic music and music-making.
It’s not surprising, given the chaos of Ives’s manuscripts, that various editions of Symphony Four have appeared; the most-recent seeming to be from 2012, its premiere conducted by, note, Péter Eötvös. In terms of this current concert It was business as usual in terms of high-quality DCH sound and picture. This adventurous programme is presented again at 19:00 hours tomorrow, similarly part of Musikfest Berlin.
Missy Mazzoli
Orpheus Undone
Péter Eötvös
Cziffra Psodia for piano and orchestra (German Premiere)
Pierre-Laurent Aimard piano
Charles Ives
Symphony No. 4
Pierre-Laurent Aimard piano, Gregor A. Mayrhofer Co-conductor, Ernst Senff Chor Berlin, Steffen Schubert chorus master
János Balázs, piano
Miklós Lukács, cimbalom
Orchestre de la Suisse Romande Orchestre de la Haute école de musique de Genève
Péter Eötvös
April 6, 2022
This is one of the most challenging concerts in my experience. I am not sure which of the two experiences, ie the concert or the composer’s text is the easiest to digest.