Notes before a final (3): Anton Webern

When you look at a score by Webern, the really obvious thing you notice is there really aren't many notes there.  You might think this makes it easy to play. You'd be wrong about that.

When I mentioned to a friend that I was going to be playing Webern's Three Little Pieces as part of my set for the Office Musician Final, her reaction was something along the lines of, "All the rep for cello you've got, and you're doing that?" 

There are  lot of preconceptions about Webern.  It's cold. It's difficult. It's unrewarding to play.  All thse things are bollocks.  Webern's music is some of the most emotional there is. He was deeply traumatised by the death of his mother in 1906, when he was 22.  He never really got over it, and pretty much his entire output after then is, I think, consumed with grief at his loss. It's grief quietly expressed.  Not chest-beating, extroivert grief, but internalised, a weight held deep inside that never leaves.  It's highly condensed: a fleeting gesture or even a single note carries the sort of weight that in conventional music would be carried by a long melody or a cascade of notes.  This is what makes it so difficult to perform: you have to reach deep inside yourself and put so much into so little.  The other thing that people find difficult to appreciate is that it needs great accuracy.  There are complex rhythms and tempo changes that aren't necessarily directly evident to the listener, but it matters to get those silences and those placements of single notes just so.  I think the point is that as a musician, you need to be filled with that level of intense concentration to put the music across to the listener. I cn honestly say that rehearsing this music has been incredibly rewarding, and my admiration for it has only increased.  It's all very well to play somethign fast and showy with lots of notes and scrambling about, but to play a single note just right - now that's real virtuosity, and far harder to bring off.

There's a affinity between Webern's inconsolable grief and that of the protagonist in "The Long-Departed Lover" which I hope will come across whn they're heard one after the other.  This is what I hope to achieve in a good programme: that the pieces all fit together and illuminate each other in some way.  I hope that the contrast of the Falla piece that follows the Webern will also shine a new light on it.  If a few people come out of it feling better disposed to Webern than they were before, I'll feel like I've achieved something.

Inobservant

Take a look at Anthony Holden's review from this week's Observer. Skip the bit about Strauss - Mr Holden doesn't like to stray too far from the opera house, so his reviews are usually about operas, especially expensive ones with big names in them. But occasionally he remembers that there are other classical music genres, and manages to get himself to one of those concert hall places. This week he's managed to navigate his way to Snape Maltings in Aldeburgh (probably relatively easy, as it was established by Britten, who of course was primarily a composer of operas). He's also aware of the current artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival, Thomas Ades (presumably because he's seen his name about the Royal Opera House advertising one of those high-profile opera commissions that stop Mr Ades writing something more interesting), although the sub who prepared the copy doesn't seem to realise that Ades doesn't feature in this concert. But the excellent French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who's due to replace Mr Ades as thge Aldeburgh Festival'sartistic director next year, does.

Consider this:

"taste-free modern slices of Schoenberg, Kurtag, Webern and Charles Ives amid some nourishing Haydn and Mozart."

Taste-free? I've heard the above composers accused of many things in my time, but blandness certainly isn't one of them. How anyone can think such things of The Unanswered Question, or Webern's Five Movements, is beyond me. And "modern"? Kurtág's still living and breathing, sure, but of the rest the most recently animate is Ives, and he died in 1954 (that's 54 years ago, Mr Holden). Those four composers represent a remarkably wide spectrum of twentieth century musical trends, and it seems unfair to brush them aside in this manner.

Mr Holden also seems confused at the difference between conducting and directing from the keyboard. He describes Aimard's conducting of Haydn's Symphony No.22 as "sprightly", and specifically states that "All went well until Aimard attempted to conduct from the keyboard." And yet his conclusion is that it's

"Just as well, perhaps, that Aimard has disavowed any ambition to give up the piano for conducting."

Huh? You just said his conducting was good! It was his directing from the keyboard in the concerto that went wrong, you said. So not only is that little dig at the end nasty and petty, it's also factually wrong.

So there you go - three paragraphs which say next to nothing about the music, and are a set-up for a punchline that doesn't work.

If someone's got a narrow viewpoint, I can put up with it (well, just about, as long as you don't ask me to talk to them for any length of time). But if you're going to be a narrow-minded music critic, you'd better write with a Swiftian level of wit and be prepared to back your opinion up rather than just casually dismiss the past century of music. Maybe if you didn't gorge your palate with late-romantic opera you'd have taste buds clear enough to appreciate other flavours.