“Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future,/ And time future contained in time past,” go the opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s poem “Burnt Norton,” part of his Four Quartets. These lines were invoked in program notes written by Luciano Berio Rome Prize winner Anthony Cheung about his piece Time’s Vestiges, which received its world premiere in the third and final concert performed by the Scharoun Ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (SEB) at the Villa Aurelia on Sunday morning, March 10. But Eliot’s lines provided, too, a kind of fil rouge by which to understand much of what unified the chronologically diverse, challenging, beautiful repertoire presented by the SEB in its fifth season at the American Academy in Rome.
Indeed, from the work of Johann Sebastian Bach (born 1685; heard in an arrangement by Elliott Carter Rome Prize winner Jesse Jones) to that of Anthony Cheung (born 1982), the SEB provided listeners with a core sample of three hundred years of concert music. The Ensemble has never contented itself with performing only traditional Baroque, Classical, or Romantic repertoire, though its interpretations of landmark chamber works such as the Schubert Octet (heard again at the AAR this weekend for the first time since 2009) have become legendary. Instead, using a flexible stable of supremely gifted musicians, the SEB has taken the lead in championing the work of new composers and in asserting the necessary continuity of repertoire, from old to very recent, in the mainstream concert hall, refusing to ghettoize the work of contemporary composers as “new music.”
The mention of a “core sample” is appropriate in speaking of the weekend’s musical offerings because, in addition to exploring notions of time-- beginning with the five years of the SEB’s own visits to the AAR, and extending to the dialogue conducted among and between composers across the centuries-- the repertoire engaged with notions of geology (for after all, the earth itself preserves another chronological record) and of geography (as the work of several of the composers presented was specific to place).
Friday evening’s concert began with Hans Werner Henze’s Quattro Fantasie (1963), which the composer arranged for clarinet, horn, bassoon, string quartet, and double bass from his own earlier Kammermusik (1958). In fact, the SEB dedicated their Friday concert to the memory of Henze, who lived outside of Rome until his death in October of 2012, and who had been a personal and professional friend of members of the Ensemble for at least 25 years. Henze’s composition was clearly the work of a master who knew the complete resources of every instrument, and the horn and bass served as the crucial link between strings and woodwinds. Anthony Cheung’s Ebbing Flow (2007) for clarinet, violin, cello and piano followed, with the composer conducting and in its European premiere, and then Jesse Jones’ 2011 About Tuning, a violin-viola duet, also in its European premiere. Cheung’s composition, written with Bach’s b-minor Partita in mind, began the dialogue with time past, and Jones’ composition, with its “floating cloud of strangely-tuned chords that take on their own identities” created a wonderful perpetual motion machine of shifting arpeggiations. Following Friday’s intermission, the SEB performed Brahms’ sublime and ultimately tragic Clarinet Quintet in b minor, another pillar of its repertoire, with clarinettist Alexander Bader delivering a masterful performance, though the SEB’s performance of this work favored intimacy over virtuosity.
Saturday night’s concert began with Jesse Jones’ arrangement of three movements of Bach’s English Suite Number Two in a-minor, originally for keyboard. In his Program Notes, Jones wrote of working on the Two-Part Inventions with his piano teacher when he was young and learning that “every line in Bach’s music is a beautiful piece in and of itself.” He made this past music present in a work of great sonic richness and spirit, a kind of cento of instrumental voices in which clarinet, horn bassoon, string quartet and double bass each took a line. The resulting aural fabric was fascinating, being recognizably both Bach and not-Bach. Jones’ next piece, the Snippet Variations (2009, heard in its European premiere) directly addressed the “anxiety of influence” felt by a contemporary composer in the presence of his/her distinguished predecessors. Jones wrote that his goal was to “weave together a coherent piece from other composers’ essential fibers” in “eight lighthearted variations, each full of fleeting allusions that playfully (though respectfully) poke fun at composers...” Jones’ composition transcended any notion of the derivative, and while being freshly original in its voice, still allowed an attentive listener to hear elements from masters such as Berg, Stravinsky, Messiaen and Copland.
The last piece before intermission was Jones’ newly-completed Abraxas, heard in its world premiere. The composition takes its title from the mysterious deity in Hermann Hesse’s eponymous novel. And in truth, from the first sounds of the breathy and strange opening motif, one was made to think of a fog-shrouded Mount Kithairon, where the god Dionysus moved with those women he had driven mad and made his worshipers and followers. The veiled gods were revealed in gathering tumult as the piece advanced (were those barbaric conch-shell horns, sounding above the primal pulse?), and through pizzicato and tapping, first in the bass and the cello and then in all the strings, the gods woke, and it was clear they were not pleased. With animal grunts, the sounds of a murmuration of starlings or a swarm of bees, the music rose to a scream. The gods’ retreat, furtive now, was marked by air blown absently into the horn, the violin bow drawn along the strings and not across them, and the piano turned into a final echo chamber.
Confronted with Schubert’s Octet in F Major for clarinet, horn bassoon, string quartet and double bass, the listener realizes that the twenty-seven-year-old composer was pushing the frontiers of the genre: this chamber music is in many respects symphonic, and in its complete mastery it ranges from peasant dance motifs through Baroque counterpoint to harmonic and emotional experiments in which Romanticism itself is being born. This is the piece with which the SEB debuted in 1983, and throughout its one-hour length, the performance never lagged for a moment. The fourth movement in particular, with its seven variations on a theme from a duet in a light opera by Schubert, allowed the ensemble instruments-- horn, cello, viola, violins-- to showcase their skills.
Sunday morning’s final concert-- like the first two very well-attended, both by the AAR community and by the Roman public-- began with Daniel Schnyder’s 2012 composition Der Bergmensch (The Mountain Man), taking its title from the mummified remains of a Bronze Age man (3300 BCE) found frozen in a glacier in the Oetztal Alps (Tyrol) north of Bolzano, Italy in 1991. In three movements, the Swiss composer resourcefully explored this fascinating conjunction of cultural and geological time. The first movement, “Rock Clock” was followed by a “Mountain Farmers’ Chamber Music Gathering” attended by a rollicking clarinet, and concluded with “Oetzi’s Death” (which in fact seems to have been from blood loss caused by an arrow wound).
Next on the program was the world premiere of Anthony Cheung’s new composition Time’s Vestiges, for clarinet, horn, bassoon, string quartet, double bass, and piano. It was in connection with this piece that Cheung had invoked, not only the lines from Eliot’s Four Quartets, but also a comment by James Hutton (1726-97), the founder of the science of geology: “We find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.” And in his Program Notes, Cheung spoke of “the ways in which metaphors drawn from geological ‘deep time’ and cycles of time can be made audible....Moments of directionality are followed by stasis, only to start up again.” Cheung gave these ideas a splendid musical embodiment, and in the final movement, in which “the strings literally erode their tunings into new, strange forms,” it was remarkable to listen to the bass being tuned down even while it was being played and to trace a glissando as it moved seamlessly from the bass across the cello. The first half of Sunday’s program concluded with Hungarian composer György Kurtág’s Hommage à Robert Schumann (1990), for clarinet, bass drum, viola and piano, a piece which obviously continued the musical dialogue across time-- in this case, between a contemporary master and his great Romantic predecessor. The composition’s six movements incorporated the names of fictional musicians (by E.T.A. Hoffmann and Wilhelm Wackenroder) and of the imaginary (and opposed) alter egos Eusebius and Florestan invoked by Schumann in his music criticism.
Following the intermission, the SEB performed Anthony Cheung’s Maquette brisée (2012) for piano and violin in its European premiere. As the piece was only three minutes long, performers Rachel Schmidt and Kim Barbier obligingly repeated it (a very helpful practice, for audience members listening to contemporary concert music), and then, in a happy inspiration, clarinettist Alexander Bader appeared to perform Cheung’s transcriptions of Jimmy Giuffre’s compositions “Past Mistakes” and “Time Will Tell,” both from Giuffre’s 1962 album Free Fall. Cheung offered a short introduction of these pieces, speaking of their “controlled microtonality.” Bader’s performance was warmly received by the audience, and as at earlier concerts during this Fellowship year, the AAR audience was reminded of Cheung’s consummate skill and the huge range of his compositional and stylistic interests.
The final offering by the SEB to its Roman public was Andreas N. Tarkmann’s arrangement of Dvořák’s “American” Suite in A Major, Op. 98b, composed in 1894-5 but published in 1911. And this piece was the perfect selection with which to conclude an extraordinary three-day exploration of time as expressed in civilization (by composers’ relationships with their predecessors and with other kinds of music) and in nature (by composers’ relationships with geology and geographical place). Dvořák’s love, not only of the folk music of his native Bohemia, but also of the music of the United States, were all on display. The fourth (Andante) movement in particular spoke eloquently of the openness of the American West and included the plangent six-note melody of a Native American lullaby before going on to incorporate motifs from Native American drumming and even from the songs of Stephen Foster. It was fitting that the last notes that rang out by this renowned German ensemble in an Italian venue were by a Czech composer celebrating his love of America. For the annual SEB concerts epitomize the potential for that cooperation between the United States and Europe to which the American Academy in Rome is committed.