Poème: Chamber Landscapes

UKARIA Cultural Centre
Adelaide Festival

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn 

This year’s Chamber Landscapes weekend at the Ukaria Centre in the Adelaide Hills was curated by Finnish pianist Paavali Jumppanen, who says in a program note that he chose the title ‘Poème’ as a guiding theme to explore the interrelationships between music, text and myth. 

I was there for three concerts last Saturday 11^th March, and found myself in various states of rapture and contemplation, as well as consuming large amounts of local produce from Ukaria's copious larder and excellent wine cellar.
 
The day's activities kicked off at noon with a concert entitled ‘The Transcendental’. This began with Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 10, which Jumppanen introduced as one of his favourite pieces, before being joined onstage by fellow Finnish violinist Elina Vähälä. The serene beauty of the work – with its lovely opening birdlike trills echoing in call-and-response between violin and piano – was a perfect match for the venue and its bucolic surroundings. However, I felt that Jumppanen’s playing was a little too compressed and abrupt to allow for the work’s expansive lyricism in the first two movements, while Vähälä remained a little too poised and aloof; although both players took more risks and had more fun in the rough-and-tumble of the Scherzo and Finale.  

 
After interval came a stupendous performance by Russian émigré pianist Konstantin Shamray of the rarely tackled Piano Sonata No.2 ‘Concord, Mass., 1840–60’ by Charles Ives. The work’s four movements are named after American writers associated with Transcendentalism – Emerson, Hawthorn, the Alcott siblings (Louisa May and her brother Bronson) and Thoreau – and are musically linked by references to the opening theme of Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony. It’s a wild and wide-ranging work by a unique outsider voice in musical history, and Shamray has the necessary trifecta of spiritual focus, heart-on-sleeve passion and sheer pianistic chops to pull it off. For me this was the musical zenith of the entire day.
 
After a fortifying lunch and glass of wine, I was back for the second concert of the day, entitled ‘Myth and Passion’, which Jumppanen introduced by speaking of three major currents in musical modernism represented by Schönberg, Scriabin and Bartok/Stravinsky. He invited us to consider the second and more ‘mystical’ current as being less well-known but perhaps having greater longevity and influence – at least as currently measured by contemporary sensibilities – after the respective heydays of serialism and neo-classicism had apparently run their course. Although in my humble opinion such historicist judgements are inevitably proved wrong by history itself, it was a telling way to frame the program that followed. 
 
This began with Szymanowski’s three ‘Myths’ for violin and piano, played by the formidable duo of Shamray and Polish violinist Jakub Jakowicz. The two players were perfectly matched in their fearless virtuosity and sense of spirit, both of which are required by the post-Symbolist idiom of the pieces, which follow in the footsteps of Debussy as well as Scriabin, their ambiguous harmonies opening suggestively onto atonality.
 
After this cellist Timo-Veikko Valve – another member of Jumppanen’s Finnish circle – took the stage for a dazzling rendition of Kitty Xiao’s In Flesh for electrified cello. This introduced another stream of modernism in the form of electronic music by augmenting the rich natural tones of the instrument with various processing and sampling techniques. Personally, I found the work a little lacking in substance, but it certainly added a note of Frankenstein-like techno-horror to the palette of the afternoon. 
 
Jakowciz then returned to the stage and was accompanied by Jumppanen for a fiery account of Lutoslawski’s ‘Subito’, a compressed and dramatic work for violin and piano that advanced further into the increasingly chromatic realm of Polish modernism pioneered by Szymanowski. 
 
The final item on the menu for this second concert was American late Romantic composer Amy Beach’s Piano Quintet. A contemporary of Ives, Beach was something of a pioneer as a female composer and pianist, whose career and genius suffered from similar restrictions to those endured by Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann. In fact the sense of tension and yearning in this work reminded me of the Piano Quintet of Brahms, but with an added dimension of almost Wagnerian ecstasy. Along with the Ives sonata, this work was another high point for me, especially in the ardent performance it was given by pianist Andrea Lam, with strong support from Vähälä and Jakowicz on violins, Christopher Moore on viola and Valve on cello. 
 
After another round of refreshments in the form of an unfeasibly large cheese platter, I was ready for the final concert of the day. Entitled ‘The Exotic’, this began with a rare performance of Pierre Boulez’s hard-core avant-garde masterpiece Le Marteau Sans Maitre (‘The Hammer Without A Master’). Written in the 1950s for an ensemble of instruments including soprano voice, flute, guitar, viola, xylophone, vibraphone and percussion – which evokes the sounds if not the forms of Japanese and Balinese music – the work is a setting of three surrealist poems by Boulez’s contemporary Rene Char. 
 
Le Marteau retains the composer’s signature post-War style of ‘total serialism’ but introduces an additional element of what he rather mischievously termed ‘local indiscipline’. Along with its exotic instrumentation, this sense of structural freedom allows space for the composer’s intuitive genius (as well as the interpretative artistry of the performers) and potentially provides some relief from the work’s otherwise almost mechanical sense of determinism (not to mention the formidable demands it places on the audience and musicians alike).
 
As a composer, conductor and intellectual Boulez has always been something of a personal hero of mine, and there was a great sense of occasion about the event, but to be brutally honest (like the man himself) I found the performance surprisingly anticlimactic and strangely unaffecting. It’s hard to be sure, but I think this was due to the overly cautious and reverential spirit in which it was conducted by American contemporary music specialist and former Boulez student Jeffrey Means, and accordingly performed by the undeniably accomplished ensemble of musicians (which included the likes of guitarist Slava Grigoryan alongside a distinguished array of fellow instrumentalists). 
 
The glowing exception was soprano/mezzo Judith Dodsworth, whose voice has enormous range and expressiveness, and who brought out the work’s playfulness and sensuality, both of which are essential aspects of Boulez’s (typically French) musical personality (and of Char’s poetry). In other words: she brought an element of jazz to what otherwise sounded at times like the organised cacophony of a totally serialist marching band. 
 
After interval, I felt a similar sense of clockwork-like automatism detracted from Vähälä and Jumppanen’s otherwise flawless performance of Debussy’s Violin Sonata. As with the earlier Beethoven sonata, their playing seemed a little too tightly wound and controlled for the work to unfurl and display its glorious colours, or to evoke some of its more soulful and jazzy resonances. 
 
A more satisfyingly Debussyian conclusion to the concert – and the entire day – was ironically provided by contemporary German composer Hans Tutschku’s work for electronically processed piano Shadow of Bells.Played by Andrea Lam with the same sensitivity that informed her performance of the Amy Beach Piano Quintet, this spacious work created a sonic landscape that reminded me of wandering through a Japanese garden filled with the sound of distant temple bells, in which I heard echoes of Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie.
 
As such it provided an appropriately poetic and exotic finale. I drove away into the darkness of the Adelaide hills on my way back to the city filled with an abiding sense of awe and mystery, and with an unfinished platter of cheese sitting on the passenger seat beside me.
 
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Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. On returning to Austria he was the lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen). He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. 
 
Professor von Flügelhorn is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is also the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.