Respighi Vetrate di Chiesa (1925-6) Dallapiccola Il prigioniero (1944-8) {Sung in Italian with English surtitles]
Ángeles Blancas Gulín (soprano – Mother), Eric Greene (baritone – Prisoner), Stefano Secco (tenor – Gaoler / Grand Inquisitor), Egor Zhuravskii (tenor – First Priest), Chuma Sijeqa (bass-baritone – Second Priest), London Symphony Chorus, Guildhall School Singers, London Symphony Orchestra / Sir Antonio Pappano
Barbican Hall, London
Sunday 5 June 2022
Written by Richard Whitehouse Pictures (c) Mark Allan Photography
This second of the London Symphony Orchestra’s two concerts of Italian music with chief conductor designate Sir Antonio Pappano consisted of two pieces that brought the aesthetic and political divisions of Italy between the world wars into acute while always productive focus.
It might have originated in piano pieces written for his wife, but Respighi’s Church Windows duly emerged among the most opulent and evocative of his orchestral works. That both title and subtitles were postpriori additions does not lessen their relevance – not least as concerns The Flight into Egypt, its tense understatement a telling foil to the ensuing Saint Michael the Archangel with its warlike images rendered graphically by brass and percussion, before climaxing in one of the most theatrical of tam-tam crashes as Satan is banished from Heaven.
Not that Respighi was averse to gentler expression as appropriate, The Matins of Saint Clare featuring orchestration of unfailing finesse on its raptly expressive course. Inevitably, it is the magisterial finale of Saint Gregory the Great when this composer comes most fully into his own – its cumulative fervour drawing on all aspects of the sizable forces for what becomes a heady apotheosis. Music, indeed, that needs to be realized with discipline and focus to avoid overkill, which was certainly the case in a performance where the LSO left nothing to chance.
The London Symphony Orchestra and London Symphony Chorus conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano perform Ottorino Respighi Church Windows
Luigi Dallapiccola Il prigioniero
In the Barbican Hall (Ángeles Blancas Gulin Mother,
Eric Greene Prisoner, Stefano Secco Gaoler / Grand Inquisitor, Egor Zhuravskii First priest, Chuma Sijeqa Second priest ) on Friday, 3 June 2022.
Photo by Mark Allan
Whereas Respighi pays (indirect) tribute to Italy’s cultural greatness, Dallapiccola exposes its darker recesses in his one-act opera The Prisoner. Composed over several years that span the decline and fall of Mussolini’s Italian empire, its libretto is drawn from the novel by the late 19th century author Villiers de l’Isle-Adam whose title Torture by Hope became subtitle for this opera by intimating the culmination of a scenario set during one of the grimmest periods in the Spanish Inquisition. By this time, Dallapiccola had evolved that distinctively personal brand of serialism which served him thereafter, but his knowledge of and devotion to Italian opera meant that those more methodical or systematic aspects are harnessed to an emotional fervour as makes for a consistently powerful and often moving while harrowing experience.
The performance was a compulsive one – centred upon Eric Greene’s assumption of the title-role that built gradually to an apex of elation suddenly and cruelly denied. The opening stage is dominated by the Mother – rendered with unfailing charisma yet never wanton melodrama by Ángeles Blancas Gulín, and Stefano Secco brought hardly less conviction to the twin-role of the Gaoler whose urgings to remain steadfast assume a chilling tone when he is revealed as the Grand Inquisitor. There were telling cameos from Egor Zhuruvskii and Chuma Sijeqa as the Priests, with the London Symphony Chorus and Guildhall School Singers combining to potent effect in offstage Psalm settings – the final one a climax of sombre grandeur. Pappano directed with absolute assurance an opera he doubtless, and rightly so, ranks with the finest.
It brought this enterprising and superbly executed concert to an impressive close. One only hopes Pappano will have the opportunity to programme further such music over the coming seasons: the enthusiastic response suggested an almost full house would be there it hear it.
Arcana has an audience with cellist Jennifer Kloetzel, on Zoom from Nebraska. Kloetzel and pianist Robert Koenig have been spending a good deal of time with the music of Beethoven, and the fruits of their labours have just been released to critical acclaim by Avie. Beethoven: The Conquering Hero is a trible album bringing together all of the composer’s works for cello and piano. It is the completion of a long-held dream for the cellist, whose enthusiasm for her project bubbles over from the off.
“I’m still celebrating!” she says of Beethoven 250, the composer’s bicentenary having been cruelly cut up by the pandemic. “This album was supposed to be released right after the 250, but we got waylaid by the pandemic, and couldn’t get into the studio to finish. I don’t think Beethoven would care that we were late though!”
Kloetzel’s route to the Beethoven sonatas came by way of the complete string quartets, which she recorded as cellist of the Cypress String Quartet (below). “We recorded the late quartets first”, she remembers, “and then, many years later, we did the middles, and then, finally, just a quick two years before we disbanded, we did the earlies. It was fascinating to go backwards through his string quartet writing. If I had started the other way I would have thought the Op.18 quartets sound Mozartian, but seeing them from that way I saw everything that was going to happen later early on. It’s like when you look at a baby picture of somebody, it’s hard to tell what they’re going to look like as someone older, but later when you look back, you see them.”
She thought carefully of the ordering on the new cello release. “I didn’t record them straight from beginning to end, but I decided to put them in that listening order. If someone wants to sit down for three hours, they can go from 1796 to 1815, and have the experience of his writing for cello and piano with that little fun arrangement of the Horn Sonata thrown in. The thing that made me pause when I was doing that was the third, fourth and fifth sonatas, which are considered the biggest ones, and you have to wait for the entire third disc.”
Kloetzel includes the variations Beethoven wrote for piano and cello, and the ‘Conquering Hero’ title of the disc takes its name from the source of the first set of variations – Handel’s chorus See The Conquering Hero Comes, from the oratorio Judas Maccabaeus. “I had a lot of pushback on that title from people”, she says. “It’s more about Beethoven being the conquering hero, and what he conquered and became – the deafness, the lack of love. Everything after the battle with his nephew, and the fact he kept turning to music to write and express himself. That’s why I decided on the title, because in my mind, he is a conquering hero.”
Throughout the three discs, Kloetzel and Koenig (below) give off a pure enjoyment of Beethoven’s work. “I love the way things are put together, and I was reminded as I was doing this project, how clever Beethoven is. One of my favourite traits in all humans is cleverness, and Beethoven has it in spades. He’ll do something where the cello is in a certain range, and he’ll make sure that the piano parts are really not anywhere near that. When I was studying it for the recording, I would look to see where the piano part was. It is really interesting and thoughtful orchestration, carefully done. There is something perfect about that endless cleverness, and the dialogue back and forth. I was telling someone the other day that I was working on the Handel Variations, and it cracked me up that Beethoven doesn’t even give the cello the main theme until the tenth variation! Even then the piano has it in canon, low in the left hand.”
The sonatas are laced with feeling. “The G minor sonata, Op.5 no.2, has some serious drama, and I hear the Op.69 A major sonata with a degree of wistfulness and sadness, which I think brings something a little different to my interpretation, that it’s not all conquering joy. The music is so varied, too – he never does anything twice! When I was in college, I wrote a paper about the last two sonatas and how they are the turning point. They contain the hallmarks, the trills, the canons and the fugues.”
She agrees that the opening of the first of Beethoven’s two Op.102 sonatas feels like the opening of a new door. “I think so. One of the things that I find fascinating is that with both the third and fourth sonatas, he begins with solo cello. I read that Beethoven said, “Art demands of us that we never stand still.” And so he never does that same thing twice. In this case, he kind of does except it’s a really different type of melody, but it definitely is a signpost towards equal partnerships. The earlier works have a bit more weight to the piano, but of course it would have been him playing it! For almost all of that early stuff, up until about 1802, that’s the case, but after that, it’s not implied anymore. Part of the reason I find this music endlessly fascinating is that it’s always surprising, even to me, or in the way the contrast and the content is set up. If you follow the markings on his music, you find that buried treasure. So many people add in crescendos and the like, but I think he knew what he was doing!”
Kloetzel also follows Beethoven’s markings for repeats, whereby sections of the sonata movements are heard for the second time. “I included every repeat in all of these works, as I am a believer in the form, and I think that he knew what he was doing. In the G minor Sonata, the first movement has a double repeat. Now I know it makes the movement 21 minutes long, but I think it’s fascinating. I never performed it that way, but as I was studying it for the recording, I realised that he meant this!”
She confesses to playing the Second Sonata when just eight years old, which begs the question – at what age did Kloetzel actually start playing the cello? “I started at age six”, she says. “My mother is an opera singer, and in my family, I’m one of four children. You had to play piano and one other instrument. When I was five I heard the sound of the cello and I said, “I want to play”. My parents were like, “You’re too young, too little.” I begged for an entire year to play the cello, and so they finally rented a half-sized cello. After about six weeks, I get my first recital, which we have a tape of, by the way!” I did my own variations on Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, but I couldn’t quite tune the cello, so it sounds a little modern! A few weeks later my teacher came to my mother and said, “She’s scaring me, she’s learning so fast. Please take her to Baltimore and find a teacher for her there. That’s where I did 10 years in the pre-college there, before going to the Juilliard School.”
Kloetzel and Koenig both met at Juilliard. “Bob and I were there around the same time. He was one of the collaborative pianists, playing mostly with violins. Then six years ago when I got the job at University of California in Santa Barbara, he was the person to reach out to me and say, “Hey, we have a job opening. I see your quartet is just ending.” So I applied, and as part of the audition we actually played the Third Sonata together, because he played with me for the audition. That’s six years ago, and we started playing together right away. We played the G minor Sonata just a few months later, and my mother said how she was blown away by the two of us, it was like ‘hand in glove’. I think the two of us come from a similar background of making chamber music and really listening and responding, which makes it a very special partnership. I just knew he was the person to do this with me!”
Kloetzel has two points of reference for running through Beethoven’s output from early to late – the string quartets and now the sonatas for piano and cello. Is there a noticeable development in his writing for cello? “Let’s look at Opus 59 no.1”, she says a little unexpectedly, turning to the first of the Razumovsky Quartets. “A middle period work, one of my favourite quartets – it’s such a cello quartet, with the Russian theme. It’s like the Op.69 sonata, we’re right in that same middle, heroic period where he’s using all the voices equally. When we get to the later quartets, some of the cello parts are extremely high. When we get to Op.132 there’s a whole passage where the cello is way up high, soaring in octaves with the first violin, versus Op.131 where it’s very low.”
Mention of Beethoven’s Op.131 quartet, in C# minor no less, prompts a discussion on his use of keys. “It is fiendishly difficult, outrageous!”, Kloetzel agrees. “I remember really studying the key relationships, and how many he had written in each. F major is important, with three works, and E flat major too. I don’t see that as much in the cello sonatas. My friend Will Meredith, who wrote the booklet notes, he has given lectures on what keys mean to Beethoven. That’s like the language of flowers! His point though was that these things mattered. E flat was the heroic key – and you think of Op.127.”
Jennifer has a sudden realisation. “You know what I need to do next, right? The piano trios!” It would be a wholly logical step. “I have played them all, and the string trios too! We’ll see though. Stay tuned!”
Speaking from my own perspective as a part time cellist, I am curious to find out the technical demands as the cycle of cello sonatas progresses. “I don’t find they are as demanding as the quartets because of the length of the pieces”, she says. “With the quartets you can sometimes feel like you are about to climb a mountain when you start the piece. When you have a great pianist in the cello sonatas, you don’t have to fight to get your sound out – and that’s partly Beethoven’s writing. The hardest thing in a way is making sure all the ranges make sense. I read once that Beethoven didn’t think the cello could really be a solo instrument, because it couldn’t cut through. That is fascinating to me given they were playing with a fortepiano.”
Kloetzel is convinced that Beethoven knew the right people – particularly two cellists he met at an opportune time. “I think when he met the Duport brothers, in the Prussian court, that changed his opinion. I think we have them to thank for this body of work, and with the Mozart Prussian Quartets, freeing up the cello a little bit. In between the Duport brothers and Antonin Kraft, Beethoven heard very good cellists and knew what was possible. Interestingly we don’t have a fully-fledged slow movement in the sonatas, or the Triple Concerto. It’s a very short slow movement, and he puts the cello very high, like a violin. The Fifth Sonata has the closest thing to a slow movement, it spins and then goes into the fugue. The arc of that work is difficult, because it’s a short first movement and then you have to make it work. With the fugue, I’ve heard it played wildly fast. For my masters recital at Juilliard, I did all five sonatas on one programme, with two intermissions. It was such a great journey.”
Kloetzel has received advice on the sonatas from a close friend, Steven Isserlis, who has himself recorded the sonatas. “I adore him”, she says warmly. “He’s crazy and wonderful. He gave a class to my students a couple of years ago, and we reconnected after. I met him a while back, and he gave me a very difficult lesson on the fourth sonata many years ago, when I was a student living in Prague and he came through. Boy did he read me the riot act, for not doing my homework better – but out of that was born a friendship, so that was wonderful!”
Kloetzel and Koenig’s new recording complement Isserlis and Robert Levin, on the fortepiano, rather nicely. “I purposely didn’t listen to his recording of the Horn Sonata before ours”, says Jennifer, “as I didn’t want to be influenced by it. It’s hard when you’re preparing for a big project like this. I have multiple versions of the pieces, and favourite versions for sure, but one is elegant, one is passionate, one is exciting.” As to the piano, she says, “You realise how much Beethoven was playing with textures in the five sonatas”. The Horn Sonata is rather different. “There are more long lines within the cello / horn part, and moments where it’s like ‘No, he didn’t write anything like that for the cello. That is why I loved including it. There is a version of the Kreutzer Sonata played on cello, but I’m not so sure! It’s in a different key, and Bob was not sure about the piano part either. When I was trying to put this together I wanted it to be what Beethoven himself wrote”.
Although Beethoven is a huge part of Kloetzel’s work, especially recently, so too is contemporary music. It is clearly important for her to manage a balance between the different established and new classical works. “Absolutely, because in a way we’re only playing older music. We’re historians, right? We’re putting a fresh look at a moment in history, so I feel it is very important to look at the music of today, so that we not only continue to start but when people look back, they see what’s being written today. I also I have a whole passion of finding what I like to call the ‘living Beethovens’, composers whose music is interesting, thoughtful and clever – all the elements I love in Beethoven. Only yesterday I was on the phone with a composer who’s writing a Cello Concerto for me, and she’s just at the very beginning of writing so we were talking about ideas. She likes to have inspiration from something I’m thinking about, so it becomes a personal thing. I definitely think it’s important to play, and then not only to premiere works, but to champion them, so they get recorded.”
This approach has stayed with her. “When I was in the quartet, we had a whole process for choosing composers to commission which involved three of us not knowing where the music had come from. We would listen to the pieces on a playlist, and had a voting system to give our verdict, and then we would find out the composer. We called it ‘blind listening’ and it was great; it was about listening to the core of the music.”
“Just like I get obsessed with Beethoven I get obsessed with new music too, and the same thing happened with the string quartet he himself was writing for, the Schuppanzigh Quartet! Over the pandemic I was of course playing a lot of Bach, because I could, and that was a part of what kept me going when all the concerts went away. It was difficult, when what you are destined to do is gone, and live streaming was not the same. I said to myself “If nothing else, let’s play a little bit of Bach!” I made sure I played it every day, and I started to craft a project where I was commissioning companion pieces for each of the suites. I have five of the commissioned works so far. I went to my ‘go tos’ first but then I wanted to go further afield. That’s the old and the new again.”
She elaborates on the composers writing alongside the Bach. “There is Elena Ruehr, who wrote with the First Suite, and then a French composer Philippe Berson, he is amazing. He wrote a piece titled Sarabande for the Second Suite. For the Third Suite I turned to the very first composer I commissioned for the quartet, Dan Coleman, who was a colleague of mine at Juilliard and lives in Arizona. For lives in Arizona, and then for the fourth a colleague of mine from Santa Barbara, Sarah Gibson, a young female composer and pianist, I love the piece she wrote! The Fifth Suite is proving a little difficult, that’s the one I’m still waiting for, the person I wanted to do it was just too busy. I’m going to give that a little space, but then for the Sixth Suite I commissioned Aaron Clay, an African-American bass player from Virginia who is a very fine composer. Four of those are unperformed, and I hope not too much time goes by before they are.
There are other pieces that have been postponed. “There is a concerto by Joel Friedman that was supposed to be premiered during 2020 but has been postponed for another year or so. It is a Double Concerto, Inferno, for viola and cello – based on Dante’s Inferno. It has a political theme of what was happening, you know, in our country there for a while. It’s electrified, and we have to do all sorts of insane things – there’s a whole Skrillex effect I have to do. I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out pedals, with delay and looping. I’m excited about this piece, and art demands of us that we never stand still! There are too many things I would like to do but not enough hours in the day.”
You can listen to Jennifer Kloetzel and Robert Koenig’s Beethoven: The Conquering Hero at the Avie Records website where you can also explore purchase options.
Once again the Tower of London has played host to a major project honouring Queen Elizabeth II. This one, entitled Superbloom, is an installation running from June to September. It is named after a rare phenomenon that occurs only once every few decades, where whole landscapes can become carpeted with flowers thanks to favourable weather and the activation of previously dormant seeds.
Twenty million seeds were sown at the Tower in spring, and are expected to flower through until September, with colours and patterns set to change each day as you would anticipate in the wild. Accompanying this gradual change will be the music of Erland Cooper, who releases the first ‘side’ of Music For Growing Flowers to coincide with the Jubilee itself. The second ‘side’ – and complete LP – will be released in August.
What’s the music like?
As everything above implies, the music is deeply ambient, thoughtful and incredibly restful. It is ideal when experienced either end of the day or in the middle of a particularly busy pattern of events, where it is most effective as it would be at the Tower, right in the middle of the City of London.
Set in a pure C major, it begins with warm drones that act as a supportive bed to the more primitive evocations of bloom, which evolve slowly but sure. When the third part of four is reached the flowering is depicted through warm cello (Clare O’Connell), bright violin (Daniel Pioro), sonorous harp (Olivia Jageurs) and otherworldly voice (Josephine Stephenson)
The last of the four parts hangs on the air beautifully, pinned on a pure harmony, and the cello line takes hold again, its breathy tones lovingly sculpted by O’Connell.
Does it all work?
Yes – Cooper has a gift for stopping time in even the busiest scenario, so do put this on when you’re at the busiest point of the day. I guarantee your wears and cares will be realigned!
Is it recommended?
Without hesitation. A beautiful and timeless piece of music, providing surprisingly sharp perspective from its slow-moving ambience.
Listen
Buy
There are several options for purchasing and streaming Music for Growing Flowers, which you can explore here
This is a collaboration from two trained pianists who also look to electronic music and synthesizers for inspiration. As the press release describes, Etienne Jaumet creates unusual sounds thanks to the rhythmic machines that accompany his piano, while Fabrizio Rat uses this classical and romantic instrument par excellence to explore the techno sphere.
What’s the music like?
There are seven intriguing tracks here, and they work as studies into the piano’s ability to create colours and tones well beyond its original design. The electronics complement the overall sound but are always in thrall to the main act, and while melodic interest is often at a premium, both musicians use what they have with impressive economy.
After a few listens those melodic cells start to plant earworms, while the different tones reveal more piano originated tones than first thought. Visione Pop, for instance, makes clever use of the higher keys as percussion, with burbling electronics providing the effective minimal riffs. Transmutazione also goes higher up the register, with a metallic timbre shifting over a constant pitch towards the lower end, but the ominous Rive Opposte, the opening track, uses the lowest end of the piano in a hollow study.
Soffiare Insieme is a longer piece, a really effective study in colour and texture that hypnotises through its regular patterns of contraction. In contrast Profondità uses the midrange piano notes like meteor trails, with a clever use of reverberation and a curious whirring in the foreground that sounds like the occasional winding of a clock.
Does it all work?
It does. The music has a darker shade to it but Jaumet and Rat clearly had a meeting of minds in the project, and the results are never less than intriguing.
Is it recommended?
Very much so. Followers of both musicians will want to acquire what turns out to be an engaging and stimulating collaboration.
G. Gabrieli Canzoni – primi toni a 8; duodecimi toni a 8 (c1597) Vivaldi Concerto for Four Violins in B minor RV580 / Op.3/10 Petrassi Concerto for Orchestra No. 5 (1954-5) Puccini Capriccio sinfonico (1883) De Sabata Juventus (1919)
Benjamin Gilmore, Julia Ungureanu, Julián Gil Rodríguez, Thomas Norris (violins), London Symphony Orchestra / SirAntonio Pappano
Barbican Hall, London
Thursday 2 June 2022
Written by Richard Whitehouse
What better way to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee than with two concerts providing a decent overview of Italian orchestral music with the London Symphony Orchestra and its chief conductor designate Sir Antonio Pappano. That relatively little of this music has managed to enter the standard repertoire only makes revivals such as these the more worthwhile.
Tonight’s programme began off-stage with two Canzoni by Giovanni Gabrieli played by LSO brass from the centre of the lower circle – Pappano facing the audience to conduct. Although a more spacious and terraced acoustic would have presented these to better advantage, their hieratic grandeur as well as intricately contrapuntal texture was an admirable foil to Vivaldi‘s Concerto for Four Violins which followed onstage. Published in his ground-breaking collection L’estro armonico, its bracing outer Allegros frame a brief while unpredictable Largo whose disjunctive contrasts of tempo and technique brought the best out of a quartet drawn from the LSO front desks and notably well-matched in temperament.
From the early 18th to mid-20th century was less of an aesthetic wrench than might be thought, the Fifth Concerto for Orchestra by Goffredo Petrassi embodying various of those facets as set out by his musical antecedents. Written for the Boston Symphony and long-serving director Charles Munch, this is arguably the most representative of its composer’s eight such works in its amalgam of technical virtuosity with that personal adaptation of serial thinking which Petrassi pursued during the post-war era. Moreover, its outwardly simple format of two movements each following a slow-fast trajectory belies a subtler and more organic evolution – such that an atmospheric prelude intensifies into a capricious scherzo whose provisional close makes possible what follows. Here, an increasingly restive intermezzo elides into a Dionysian toccata with brass and percussion to the fore – then a pensive epilogue returns the music to the inwardness from which it had emerged. A superb performance from the LSO, and a timely revival of this not so minor masterpiece.
His operas brought the orchestral component of Italian opera to a new level of sophistication, but Puccini wrote little for orchestra alone. Essentially his graduation exercise, Capriccio sinfonico is equally a ‘statement of intent’ with its unfolding from a sombre opening (later to be redeployed in Edgar), through an energetic central phase (its main idea familiar as the opening of La bohème), to a modified reprise of that first section which brings about a gently fatalistic close. Pappano duly guided the LSO through an assured reading of music known ‘by default’, making one regret that Puccini’s later focus on opera to the virtual exclusion of all else left no comparable orchestral work from his maturity.
Much the same might be said of Victor de Sabata (above), whose international career as a conductor from his late thirties left him with little time or inclination to compose. A sequence of symphonic poems from around the early 1920s confirms sure mastery of the orchestra, and if Juventus is hardly the deepest of these, its dramatic flair and gestural immediacy are not to be gainsaid. Here, too, there is a three-part structure – the vaunting aspiration of youth becoming subsumed into the trials and setbacks which come with experience, before a revival of those earlier convictions ensures a close of blazing affirmation. Other composers might have invested such a sequence with a dialectical sense of change and attainment, but de Sabata is content to take these implications at face value – while investing his music with a greater subtlety and resourcefulness than it has often been credited for (not least by the writer of this evening’s programme note). This was certainly evident in Pappano’s take on a piece which could yet attract plaudits for other than its name.
As if mindful of the context in which this concert was heard, Pappano opened the second half with a rendering of the National Anthem – somewhat to the surprise of an audibly bemused audience, and presumably not to be repeated for Sunday’s follow-up programme that features Respighi and Dallapiccola at their (very different) communicative best.
To read more on the London Symphony Orchestra’s current season, visit their website
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