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Alix Goolden Performance Hall
March 29, 2014
"The metronome ... a lifeless, soulless machine, cannot express the meaning, the object of inspiration, it cannot be used as a means to develop emotion - guided by a machine the performance is wholly mechanical."
Thus wrote Robert Challoner in his 1880 tome History of the science and art of music: Its origin, development, and progress.
It is a curious aspect of György Ligeti's notorious Poème symphonique, scored for 100 metronomes, that the work is simulataneously both completely deterministic yet random. Deterministic because once the metronomes have been set to ticking, the next fifteen or twenty minutes are inevitable; indeed, the composer himself wrote that "if the settings are adhered to strictly, then the resulting piece of music is almost always the same".
Yet in the act of setting the metronomes going, randomness enters the picture: in the absence of 100 co-ordinated operators, no two performances are going to begin in exactly the same way. T.S. Eliot might almost have had this in mind when he wrote in The Hollow Men: "Between the conception / And the creation / Between the emotion / And the response / Falls the Shadow".
Perhaps this in some ways goes to explain the relative disappointment I felt at Saturday's performance, which opened the final salvo in the Ligeti Festival.
"Relative", because the mere fact of witnessing 100 metronomes is an experience in itself; "disppointment" because the unfolding of the piece seemed curiously dull. The metronomes themselves were laid out on two tables and the 'nomes on the left-hand table clearly were not exerting themselves sufficiently to do the work justice: every one of them had wound down while those on the right-hand table, clearly more convinced by the music, were still ticking away merrily.
Moreover, the phase of the piece when "changing rhythmic patterns emerge, depending on the density of the ticking" (the composer again), when it is almost impossible to believe that such extraordinarily asymmetric patterns are composed of many monotonous regularities superimposed, that phase seemed to last almost no time at all.
Nevertheless, I shall remain forever grateful at having this chance to hear a signature piece of 20th century music. Like Cage's 4' 33", Poème symphonique is a piece that did not exist and was therefore necessary to invent.
The major attraction of the evening was Ligeti's Piano Concerto, a work of tremendous rhythmic complexity, demanding extreme virtosity from all involved.
Roger Admiral was an outstanding soloist - unfortunately, the staging required that the piano be placed so that nobody in the audence could see his hands - and Tania Miller directed a marvellously vital accompaniment. It is hard to imagine the Victoria Symphony of even a decade ago managing to pull this music off.
Four of the five movements are quick - the bouncy and noisy opening movement, the third with its long rhythmic arch, the fractured rhythms of the fourth and the frantic finale; only the second is slow and this was particular intense, with some excellent winds.
For a well-earned encore, the performers repeated the opening movement.
The other Ligeti work performed was his Ramifications scored for a dozen strings in two groups tuned a quarter-tone apart.
This piece seems to expand and develop ideas from his full orchestral piece, Atmospheres, of several years earlier; in particular the opening seemed determined to answer the question "how many ways are there of playing an arpeggio?". While mostly very quiet, the music occasionally burst into a fortissimo, sounding like a Bartók quartet run amok, while the quarter-tone tunings lent the work a decidedly other-worldly feel.
The programme was completed (some might say "over-completed" given its length) by two works by Canadian composers.
Ana Sokolovic's Nine Proverbs is made up of nine short movments played without break. Even with the changing "mood" lighting I found it hard to keep track.
And I presume that the proverbs stem from Sokolovic's native Serbia; certainly I have never encountered "Filling the well after the calf has drowned" or "not bearing the sun to shine on water" before, while "drinking to excess constantly causing poverty, ruin and dishonour" sounds not so much a proverb, more an observation.
But the music, as I have discovered with Sokolovic in the past, has sufficient originality and variety not to require explanation and Miller directed a performance of considerable vitality which held the interest throughout. (I particularly enjoyed percussionist Corey Rae's most musical emptying of a bucket of water.)
If there was one work I would have dropped to shorten the programme, then it would have been Paul Frehner's Ochus Bochus, which, like the Sokolovic, consisted of fairly short movements played with hardly a break (cue the coloured lights once more).
The work was the proverbial curate's egg ("parts of it were very good") with The Conjuror - all bouncy syncopated pizzicatos, not to mention its use of the bovine flatulence of the contrabassoon - perhaps the standout movement.
Undoubtedly well-played, but perhaps slightly de trop.
Overall, this was a very fine close to the Ligeti Festival.
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