Concert Reviews

Birtwistle, Britten, Strauss and Schulhoff at the Musikfest Berlin

Inescapable doom and a melancholic fate were looming large yesterday at the Philharmonie, where the Bamberger Symphoniker under Jonathan Nott gave a spectacular concert that included Birtwistle’s The Shadow of Night, Britten’s Violin Concerto, and Strauss’s Tod und Verklärung. The concert was spectacular for two reasons: First, for the subtle programming of the evening, and, second, for the fine musicianship of both the orchestra and Daniel Hope, the soloist in Britten’s concerto.

The prospect of a concert filled with works that refer in some way or the other to melancholy, war, and death seemed at first not very refreshing to me. In the course of the evening, however, I became increasingly aware of the plentitude of paths that the pieces on the program explored towards darkness and the abysses of modern life. Harrison Birtwistle’s The Shadow of Night was, according to the composer, influenced by Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia and John Downland’s lute song In darkness let me dwell. Throughout the piece, Birtwistle quotes the first three notes of Dowland’s song, thus establishing a direct connection between his own shadow-landscape and the melancholic darkness of Downland’s song (the first three notes of Dowland’s song are sung to the words In darkness). And while in Dowland’s original the darkness portrayed is quite a thick and thorough one, Birtwistle’s darkness is more of a permeable kind. Every now and then reflections of light traverse the landscape and flickers of shadows obscure the view. Birtwistle achieves these effects by constantly transforming the timbre and melodic shapes: no two moments in the piece are the same and yet everything sounds similar and familiar. It’s this kind of simultaneity of foreigness and familiarity that makes listening to Birtwistle’s piece such a rewarding endeavour.

In Britten’s Violin Concerto the terrors of war and fascism in Spain are portrayed by quite different means. The work begins, like Beethoven’s violin concerto, with a timpani solo, the rhythmic core of which is repeated throughout the three movements in different instrument configurations and motivic shapes. The insistence on this succinct rhythm creates an haunting atmosphere that disturbes even the moments of temporary release. This effect is further enhanced by the Passacaglia in the end of the work, in which a repetitive bass line adds to this sense of irreversibility of fate.

Finally, the concert concluded with one of Richard Strauss’s most popular pieces, Tod und Verklärung, in which the imminent death of an artist who remembers moments past is set to music. This kind of melancholic remembrance is differing a lot from the two other settings of melacholy and despair on the program. Instead of devastating and unchangeable fate, one hears raging emotion, ups and downs of tension, and eruptions of feeling and pain in this piece.

What I enjoyed furthermore, besides from the programming, was the luscious sound of the Bamberger Symphoniker. Although the balance of the various instrumental groups was not always as smooth as one could hope for (especially in the Birtwistle), their timing and interplay was precise and soulful throughout. The impressive performance of Daniel Hope was the highlight of the evening. By playing the second movement from Erwin Schulhoff’s Sonata for Violin as an encore right before the intermission, he set a memorable counterpoint to the last item on the program: on the one hand music by a Czech communist who died in a German concentration camp, on the other hand music by one of Germany’s most prestigious composers, the president of Goebbels’s Reichsmusikkammer, Richard Strauss.

Daniel Hope

PS: There are still tickets left for the upcoming concerts of the festival.

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