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‘Lyricism in the 20th Century’ Music Festival, 1–15 April, Taipei, Taiwan.

Reviewed by Michael Haas
posted October 19, 2009

The genesis of Taipei’s first international ‘Lyricism in the 20th Century’ Music Festival is too complicated to go into; suffice it to say that the festival artistic director Evelyn Chan, president of a number of organisations supporting such composers as Franz Schreker and Karl Weigl, has come up with a winning and ultimately convincing programme that deserves a wider public – though the audiences in Taipei were both appreciative and, considering the unfamiliar repertoire, surprisingly numerous. Two large orchestral concerts framed six chamber-music and song programmes over a two-week period. The subtext of the festival was the legacy of Brahms and Austria and Germany’s forgotten composers: a nice way of bringing repertoire banned as degenerate by the Third Reich back into the concert hall without having to delve too deeply into European history for the Taiwanese. It also allowed Ms Chan a degree of programming freedom, with works popping up by Brahms (his rarely performed but beautiful Nänie for chorus and orchestra); George Enescu, Pierre de Bréville, Claude Debussy, Bruno Maderna and Samuel Barber. The strategic presence of these composers provided both a musical contrast as well as delivery from the ghetto to which composers banned by Hitler too often find themselves re-consigned.

The opening orchestral concert was conducted by Israel Yinon with the nearly totally female Evergreen Symphony Orchestra with the combined choruses of the Taipei Male Choir and the Taipei Teachers’ Chorus. The opening with Brahms Nänie hit just the right mood,and the performance in the acoustically superb National Concert Hall was stunning. The Taiwanese chorus may have been slightly light on the bass end and the German pronunciation perhaps not as perfect as we would expect from European choirs, but the homogeneity of sound, cleanness of intonation, precision of voicing and sheer musicianship more than compensated.  Yinon has grown as a conductor and has an instinctive sense of shaping both lines and architecture. Climaxes are never abrupt and resonate for exactly the amount of time that the musical tension can bare. Brahms can often sound rather dull in texture and it takes sensitive pacing to keep performances of his works turning into dark glue. The bright but reverberant acoustics of the hall helped amplify both clarity and, somewhat contradictorily, volume by offering just the right amount of ambience to remove the harder edges from instruments, chorus and soloists.

Brahms was followed by Alexander Zemlinsky’s ‘Prelude and Interlude’ from his opera Es war einmal once again confirming my personal opinion that it is surely one of the most magical and beautiful operas ever to grace the stage at the turn of that century. Urban legend reports that Mahler had a hand in adjusting the orchestration – perhaps so – but the two orchestral extracts sound to my ears as Zemlinsky at his best with all the sheen and colour that music between the two centuries was offering along with the sort of melodic material that somehow seems unique to Jugendstil Vienna. Zemlinsky was followed by Franz Schreker’s Schwanensang, again superbly sung and performed by chorus and orchestra.

Gary Hoffman, soloist for the Cello Concerto of Julius Bürger, admitted that he was studying the work up until the moment he walked on stage. Perhaps it was insecurity that tamed some of the tempi, but having recorded the work with the composer present, I can say that Hoffman’s performance made the first and third movements sound more integrated into the poignant central movement, dedicated to Bürger’s mother, shot on transport to Auschwitz. This dedication is hand-written in the score and has thus led to a number of performances of the slow movement on its own. As such, it has a tendency to hog both the emotional and musical centre of gravity of the whole concerto. For me, this has always been the problem with the work. The third movement breaks away from the magical last wisps of the Adagio with an almost coldblooded indifference to what went before. Hoffman is a supremely elegant player who seems artistically and emotionally incapable of bad taste. His caution with the faster movements may have been a serendipitous result of his lack of familiarity with the work. It certainly paid off. What the work may have lost in its roller-coaster emotional highs and lows, it gained as poise and elegance dominated the outer movements and left the central Adagio less ‘naked’. Brahms’ more familiar Schicksalslied finished off the programme with both choir and orchestra.

The final concert of the Festival took place exactly two weeks later and with composers such as Boris Blacher (born and partially raised in China), Karl Weigl and Karol Rathaus on the menu, it was not offering anything to tempt more conventional listeners. This would have been a pity, as the programme, in common with all of the concerts in the festival, offered nothing that might frighten any horses. Chan’s refusal to bill the festival programme as a selection of banned music made it easier to include the more ambivalent figure of Boris Blacher, whose Concertante Music was premiered in Berlin in 1937 by no less a figure than Carl Schuricht. Blacher was further championed by Karl Böhm and to the progressives within the Nazi ranks Blacher may have appeared the ideal contemporary composer, until it was revealed that he was quarter-Jewish. His racial make-up aside, the work is a masterpiece of German neo-classicism and demands enormous virtuosity from individual players. Its coda must have brought goose bumps to audiences as well as to entire ranks of Nazi cultural pooh-bahs, many of whom had placed their hopes on Blacher as representing the progressive musical face of National Socialism after Hindemith was lost to them. Onto the neusachlich framework of the first two movements is bolted an intoxicating string melody played as if by a thousand angels swooping down from on high. It’s a masterstroke of musical theatre and deception. Anyone who thought they were in for another round of Hindemith’s Kammermusik was dizzyingly proved wrong. But what was Blacher thinking at the time? It’s a work of pure genius and elevates itself from standard German Post-Regerism to almost drunken heights of romanticism. Was he doing this because (a) he knew he could and get away with it, due to the sheer brilliance and audacity of his imagination or more frighteningly, (b) because he knew the ‘new guard’ would like it? Within this single work, the musical equivalent of Functionalism collides headlong into late Romanticism.  It’s concert music as coup-de-théâtre. It hardly matters today, more than seventy years later, what Blacher’s motives may have been, but it intrigues and enchants and it surprised me that it’s not heard more often.

The Weigl Violin Concerto finally proved that Karl Weigl was a composer to take seriously. Until now, a few works for soprano and quartet aside, I’ve heard nothing, including the fêted Fifth Symphony that convinces me that he was ever more than a musical ‘auch dabei’ from fin de siècle Vienna.  The Violin Concerto changes this opinion. It dazzles with a luminosity that reminds me of Szymanovski without the exotic melismatic orientalism. It nonetheless remains ‘exotic’ in its own right, with outer movements that obviously inhabit the same world as Strauss without being influenced by him. The same cannot be said of the slow middle movement which sounds like Mahler might have, had he lived and developed for another fifteen years. The homage to Mahler is never derivative, and Weigl remains, Mahler’s presence notwithstanding, Weigl. Philippe Graffin was as worried as Gary Hoffman and remained in locked rooms practising until the first rehearsal. I can understand his bewilderment. The violin is never presented as the virtuoso solo instrument that elaborates material first expounded by the orchestra. In fact, the material is so interwoven within the fantastic colours of Weigl’s instrumentation that the violin never stops, filling every musical pause with a flashing brilliance that matches any concerto of the twentieth century.  It must surely be one of the largest orchestras ever to accompany a solo violin but the cumulative effect was one of utter bafflement that the work is not better known. It takes a Graffin to pull it off.

I was just considering the tragic implications of mistakenly having condemned Karl Weigl to the musical dust-bin when along came a performance of another unfamiliar work that was nothing short of a tour de force: Karol Rathaus’ Third Symphony. I know that Yinon has recorded the work, but nothing prepared me for the shock of hearing it live in the staggering acoustic of the Taiwan hall. Not only was it amplified to a degree that no recording could possibly match, but his tempi and the pure brilliance of the orchestral playing must also have surpassed what he committed to CD.  Every work on this programme was more than just a forgotten oddity: I would have had no problem placing any of them next to the greatest music of the twentieth century. The fact that the composers lived through troubled times underlines how much was lost. Yet it’s often too easy not to rejoice at what’s still here.

The chamber music concerts – six in total – gave us largely unfamiliar works by a cross-section of composers. The first offered Weigl’s Bilder und Geschichten für Klavier, Op. 2, Schönberg’s unknown and untypical Op. 2 Lieder and Verklärte Nacht and Hindemith’s Des Todes Tod for soprano, two violins and two violas. 

The second evening offered Berg’s Piano Sonata, songs by Hans Gál, Enescu’s Konzertstück and Korngold’s Sextet.

The third presented Webern’s Langsamer Satz for quartet from 1905; a selection of songs with Baudelaire texts by Debussy, Bréville and Zemlinsky; early songs by Franz Schreker; Entführung by Alexander Zemlinsky; Ernest Bloch’s Baal Schem for violin and piano; Egon Wellesz’s sonata for solo cello and Weigl’s Five Songs for soprano and string quartet.

Concert four: Bruno Maderna’s Ständchen für Tini; Wellesz’s Kirschblütenlieder; Wilhelm Grosz’s songs with old-Jewish texts and Ernst Toch’s Spitzweg Trio followed by Zemlinsky’s Second Quartet.

Concert five: Berthold Goldschmidt’s Capriccio for solo violin along with four songs for baritone; Fiedellieder by Ernst Krenek; Rathaus’ Suite for violin and piano, Op. 27, and Gál’s Piano Trio, Op. 18

Concert six: several piano works by Boris Blacher; Jazzband by Wilhelm Grosz for violin and piano; a selection of songs from Hanns Eisler’s Hollywooder Liederbuch; Julius Bürger’s Zigeunerlieder arranged for violin and piano; and finally a selection of four-handed piano works by Samuel Barber and a further selection of songs by Karol Rathaus.

There was very little that was atonal and virtually nothing with more than a hint of dodecaphonia. If a scale were taken with, say, the most clangorous post-war German experimentalism at 10 and Claude Debussy at 1, the Taipei programmes remained resolutely hovering around 3, with a maximum of 4. One has to be honest and admit that nothing would have emptied the halls quicker than music that did not attempt to come halfway towards the audience. The Taiwanese have little to gain from understanding the circumstances of Europe’s avant-garde and thus provide a fairly accurate barometer to what an intelligent un-prejudiced listener is prepared to risk. They clearly have better things to do than listen to music that doesn’t at the very least excite their curiosity. Taking ‘music banned by the Nazis’ and plonking it down as raison d’être for eight concerts at a prominent venue cuts no ice with a group of people who have seen quite enough local bloodshed over the last 100 years. All I can say is that probably  many more Taiwanese came to hear music banned by the Nazis than would have been the case in London, Paris or Berlin had programmes of music banned by Mao or Chiang Kai-shek  been on offer.  In any case, it’s worth remembering that Taiwan, for better or worse, is home to more than 2 million refugees following Mao’s consolidation of mainland China. As I gave my pre-concert talks on music and exile, there was more than a glimmer of local recognition. The performances were largely first-rate by Taiwanese musicians living in Europe, such as soloists from the ‘Jade Quartet’ and Evelyn Chan. Philippe Graffin and Gary Hoffman also participated though at no time did one have the impression that local musicians were dealing with a fundamentally foreign idiom. Indeed, music’s ability to cross barriers of language and culture was perfectly exemplified. It was the sort of show-case that would have silenced a still prevalent view that ‘if these composers had really been any good, we would have heard of them despite Hitler’. This is an opinion that one still encounters amongst cynics in Austria and Germany, often underlining an alarming prejudice by reeling off the names of the many non-Jewish composers who were exiled and have continued to occupy a place in musical life since 1945: Bartók, Martinů, Hindemith, Berg, etc. Sadly, few such sceptics seem prepared to consider the possibility of lingering anti-Semitism that probably coloured the post-War reception of music by composers proscribed by Hitler.  In any event, this was not an argument that had to be won in Taipei. The musicians took the music as they found it and the audience responded accordingly. It took a clever programmer with a good knowledge of what the locals would tolerate to put the show together and Evelyn Chan never pushed boundaries further than she believed could be comprehended by local music-lovers. By European standards, it was tame, but by any standards, it was a stimulating offering with a varied diet of unfamiliar yet surprisingly strong works. Congratulations to all and a medal (at the very least) should go to Ms Chan.

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