Tempo 59 (231) 37–56 © 2005 Cambridge University Press 37 DOI: 10.1017/S0040298205000057 Printed in the United Kingdom Schwetzingen: Adriana Hölszky’s What worked best in this not over-attractive ‘Der gute Gott von Manhattan’ evening was a highly competent, mildly engaging staging by Stephan Kimmig (also Stuttgart); a Adriana Hölszky – Romanian-born, but Stuttgart- vivid 8-part chorus from Dresden’s Sächsische based since 1976 – scored a deserved, significant hit Staatsoper (the co-commissioners), who went when her first opera, Bremer Freiheit, based on through their nightmarish antics well; capable Rainer Maria Faessbinder, was staged at the 1988 singing from the two ‘representative’ central Munich Biennale. Two other operas – one based characters, Jan and Jennifer (former Dresden on Jean Genet – had their premières in Vienna and chorister Andreas Scheibner and Stuttgart-trained Bonn, before Stuttgart’s ever-pioneering Ann-Katrin Naidu). And above all the first-rate Württembergisches Landestheater commissioned playing – including some stunning antiphonal Giuseppe e Silvia, based on Hans Neuenfels, in 2000. brass/percussion, all the more powerful in such A sheaf of chamber and orchestral works have an intimate environment – under conductor seen premières at festivals such as Styria and Alexander Winterson, John Eliot Gardiner’s Vienna, and (even more aptly) at Donaueschingen. former assistant at Munich, who also conducted Aptly, because Adriana Hölszky is a pretty much Hölszky’s Bremer Freiheit at Stuttgart and later the unreconstructed Modernist, whose musical première of her opera Tragödia in Bonn. language would sit well in the Boulez, Nono and Winterson had no problem making the music Stockhausen-dominated early 1960s. In some speak clear as well as loud, and his players ways it accords less well with Schwetzingen, a responded ably to the score’s wealth of detail. Rhineside mini-Versailles near Mannheim, whose Hölszky has offered a lucid analysis of what she’s Rococo palace theatre, launched in 1752 with trying to achieve structurally. The problem is that Molière, is one of the most charmingly and for the average polite, supportive opera-goer most endearingly Mozartian of all German venues. of this samey Serialist, pathos-devoid stuff goes Rare Baroque revivals are a speciality. Henze’s right over their heads, and doubtless ears too. The Elegy for Young Lovers was premièred there in 1961, two bizarre squirrels’ ditties in the vivid and Pollicino and The English Cat in 1981/3; while ‘Marionettentheater’/Bassarids-like interlude, and Egk, Fortner, Reimann and, more recently, two their superb duet (Birgit Fandrey, Anja Maria new operas by Salvatore Sciarrino are among the Kaftan) when they reappear as policemen, were 32 opera premières to date, reflecting the two of the most bearable bits. Yet any real Schwetzingen Festival’s bold and industrious achievement seemed to defeat itself musically: commissioning policy. and what should emerge as an existentialist, This year’s results were mixed: an ear-battering slightly Dürrenmatt-like mystery looked all too might seem a slightly Napoleonic solution to the much like just another nervy excess of German 2004 commission. Hölszky’s Der gute Gott von stagecraft. A gypsy Fortune-Teller (Elisabeth Manhattan features a fuzzily elusive, possibly Wilke) gets underused, and thus unbalancingly botched libretto culled by the composer from the wasted; the good God (Daniel Gloger), when he Klagenfurt-born, Rome-based Existentialist appears bicycle-borne, is a squawking philosopher-poet Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–73) countertenor: more assault. Hölszky specified the – who was Henze’s librettist for Der Junge Lord and squirrels should be ‘shrill, and sharp as a knife.’ the Kleist-based Der Prinz von Homberg. It’s a kind Frankly, her whole opera sounded a bit like that. of ‘if only love could save the world, but it can’t – Roderic Dunnett death-and-destruction seem the only logical way out’, or ‘après moi le déluge’, nihilistic plot (a dance of death, in fact) centering on two lovers and their dissociated cavortings in a hotel Lucerne Festival 2004: Harrison Birtwistle bedroom (actually three bedrooms: they gradually make their way up to the 57th – i.e. top Among major European festivals, the Lucerne – floor, before the final balloon goes up (or bomb Festival is outstanding in the attention it pays to goes off). Prescient? Maybe. contemporary music. The latest manifestation of http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 07 Dec 2010 IP address: 194.80.32.10 38 this is the founding of an annual Lucerne Festival looked like a seriously glitzy pre-concert party), is Academy for young professional players, clearly enough to make British promoters, specializing in the music of the 20th and 21st grubbing around for enough support to keep centuries, under the leadership of Ensemble composers up to subsistence level, green with envy. Intercontemporain and the indefatigable Pierre The Shadow of Night is a work which reverts to Boulez. Nor is this is on the modest scale of a Birtwistle’s old obsession with melancholy – ‘young Sinfonietta’: its final concert, conducted hitherto most clearly expressed in Melancolia I by Boulez, began with Harrison Birtwistle’s (1976), named after a celebrated Dürer engraving. massive Earth Dances. It grows out of the first line of Dowland’s bleak The choice of this work was no coincidence, as lute song In darkness let me dwell – though it can Birtwistle, in his seventieth birthday year, was the hardly be a coincidence that the opening turning Festival’s composer-in-residence. The programme semitone of Dowland’s melody corresponds to included more than a dozen of his works, though the start-up motive of so many of Birtwistle’s no music-theatre (Lucerne being a notably un- works. This gives rise to a continuous nocturne operatic festival). Among them were ‘imported’ lasting the best part of half an hour, punctuated performances of Pulse Shadows, by the familiar by frequent quickenings of tempo to short, Nash/Arditti team, and Theseus Game, by violent climaxes, and ending with a striking Ensemble Modern, as well as the first complete gesture: a chord on low strings and bells, a single performance of Orpheus Elegies, by the counter- high, loud trumpet note, then as the bells die tenor Andrew Watts with Heinz and Ursula away two gentle scrapes of the guiro. Holliger. Birtwistle’s composer-in-residence status Night’s Black Bird (the title is taken from another also meant that he was featured in an exhibition of Dowland lute-song, Flow My Tears) inhabits the musical portrait photographs spread all over the same nocturnal world, but in Birtwistle’s words town, so that one kept coming across his face ‘takes listeners on a different route through the unexpectedly – often pictured by Betty Freeman in same musical landscape’ – a familiar analogy in his delightfully domestic contexts – in foyers and shop music, and indeed a familiar procedure both windows. (My favourite shot, though, was of within pieces and from one work to another. Its Boulez and a hip-hop d.j., side by side and smiling opening is a slightly more eventful version of the at the camera, but clearly without either having start of The Shadow of Night, and its ending is the faintest idea who the other was.) identical. But, compared to the earlier work, it’s On a flying visit, I caught the first two shorter (about 12 minutes), and perhaps more Birtwistle performances of the festival, on 21 obviously evocative of the natural world: the little August. In the morning, in the light, modern quickenings of tempo seem to peak in animal Lukaskirche, the second half of Pierre-Laurent screams; the melodic line, shared around high Aimard’s piano recital included three of the woodwind and at one point in piercing eight-fold Harrison’s Clocks pieces – interleaved with music unison, takes on the aspect of birdsong. by Ligeti, Ravel and Bartók in a continuous The performances seemed well-paced and sequence suggested by the idea of repetition. The sympathetic, belying the reputation Welser-Möst brilliance of the playing matched the inspiration acquired in his time with the London of this ‘composed programme’, which certainly Philharmonic as no friend of modernism. The caught the imagination of a large audience. Cleveland Orchestra’s refined woodwind section That evening, in the magnificent lakeside could perhaps have summoned up a little more Konzertsaal, the Cleveland Orchestra and its raucousness at times; and even in the pin- music director Franz Welser-Möst performed droppingly clear Konzertsaal acoustic, the harps Birtwistle’s The Shadow of Night and its brand new and some of the percussion didn’t always come companion-piece Night’s Black Bird. The former through enough. was written in 2001 to a Cleveland Orchestra Beforehand, Birtwistle had called Night’s Black commission, and first performed under Welser- Bird a ‘postscript’ to The Shadow of Night, and Möst’s predecessor Christoph von Dohnányi; it suggested it should be performed after it, reached the BBC Proms in 2003. The latter is the separated by a performance of the Dowland first in a series of commissions sponsored by the song. At a late stage, the order was reversed, Roche pharmaceutical company, to be unveiled pointing up the fact that the two works are in both at the Lucerne Festival and at Carnegie Hall parallel rather than in series, and creating a in New York: the 2005 commission has been satisfying shaped and varied sequence. (The awarded to Chen Yi. The amount of money dyspeptic critic who, after the Edinburgh Festival involved, not only in the commissioning itself but performance a few days later, described it as ‘the also in a lavish accompanying book (and in what glummest 50 minutes you are likely to spend in a http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 07 Dec 2010 IP address: 194.80.32.10 39 concert hall’ could hardly have been listening very help, as well as half a dozen volunteers from Japan, closely – but then he also called the single- Canada, England and Germany including myself.