For Edgar Varèse, portrayed here by Robert W. Chandler, there were several Americas – that is also the motto of the Berlin Music Festival.
Photo: imago images/KHARBINE-TAPABOR
America? “I’m so tired of you America,” sings Rufus Wainwright in his song “Going To A Town,” and explains in a background report on the video that he thinks America is “beautiful but thorny.” In the Trump era, this song, which was written in 2007 and covered by George Michael in 2011, took on an additional bitter note.
America is the motto with which the Berlin Music Festival under its artistic director Winrich Hopp advocates an expansion of the canon of 20th century music: namely, to present more works from the Americas, i.e. from composers such as John Adams, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Alberto Ginastera, Ruth Crawford-Seeger and, above all, from Charles Ives, who not only composed some of the most radical music of the first half of the 20th century, but also made a name for himself as a supporter, indeed as a patron, of Pan-American modernism.
But the 2024 Music Festival is not just about making the audience aware of American music. American orchestras have also been explicitly invited: not only those from North America, but also from South America, and not just those like the renowned »Big Five« the USA, but also the Kansas City Symphony. Diversity is the program!
And so the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, under its Swiss chief conductor Thierry Fischer, put on the ultimately inspiring opening concert last Saturday. The small reservation applies to the unfortunately somewhat vaguely played opening piece, “Central Park in the Dark” by Charles Ives from 1906 to 1909, revised in 1936 and first performed in New York in 1946. Of course, the strings circling around themselves in daring fourths “embody the nocturnal sounds and the silence of the darkness,” as the composer stated. And the rest of the orchestra interrupts them with a variety of noises: we hear street singers and night owls singing fragments of radio hits of their time or “whistling the march of the freshmen from Yale,” sounds “from the occasional passing elevated train,” ragtime sounds from the apartments, a street band, a fire engine; Suddenly everything culminates in a rapid and almost derailing build-up, only to disappear immediately; the darkness can be heard again, “an echo that sounds across the pond … and then we go home.”
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Ives has put all these sounds together – “sounds of nature and events that one could hear in the past (before cars and radios dominated the earth and the air)” – but not composed them with a kind of sample like his contemporary Mahler, but rather assembled them next to and on top of each other. This montage creates a pull of darkness – which can also shine, which unfortunately could not be experienced in the somewhat indecisive and undecided interpretation of the orchestra from São Paulo.
The situation is completely different with the Violin Concerto op. 30 by the Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera, which was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premiered by this orchestra in 1963 under Leonard Bernstein with Ruggiero Ricci as soloist. The violinist Roman Simovic, born in 1981 in Lviv, Ukraine, who plays the solo part for the originally announced Hilary Hahn, tackles the sprawling, more than five-minute solo cadenza with which the work begins, powerfully and with an occasionally brutalist tone. It is a dialogue with itself; tender sequences are repeatedly incorporated before the soloist and orchestra then work on this material together in six “studies”.
The expressive 2nd movement, reminiscent of Bartók, is wonderful. It is an adagio for 22 soloists, in which there is no solo or tutti, but everyone plays together in a friendly manner, so to speak. The last movement is a tattered scherzo, which begins with whispering, barely audible tones from the soloist, then quotes themes from Paganini’s 24th Caprice and ends with a short perpetuum mobile in which the soloist has to hold his own against aggressive attacks from the percussion.
Ginastera’s bold violin concerto shows that the composer, in his late phase, which he himself describes as “neo-expressionist”, was intensively involved with surrealism, serialism, microtonality and aleatoric music. A difficult work, not only extremely demanding for the soloist, but also for the listeners. Roman Simovic mastered it brilliantly, and the audience’s thunderous applause also seems to indicate an understanding of the work, which they would definitely like to hear more often in concert. Simovic played a Ysaÿe sonata as an encore, gripping, wild and emotional.
The best part of this long concert comes last: Edgar Varèse’s “Amériques”, composed between 1918 and 1922. The programme notes that its premiere in 1926 by Leopold Stokowski was a “success” that “inspired” the composer. Well, the opposite may have been the case: The “New York Times” described “Amériques” as “thoroughly wrong” and declared it a “scandalous piece”, which the audience did not need to be told twice and hissed, gesticulated, whistled and roared like crazy at the New York premiere. So “Amériques” became a scandalous piece, like Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps” in Paris 13 years earlier. Varèse’s next work, “Arcana”, was even described by one critic as “a piece of rubbish”.
Edgard Varèse, for Frank Zappa “the idol of my youth”, was hated by the bourgeoisie not only as a composer but even more so as a class enemy. Varèse knew Lenin and Trotsky well, he was a conductor of communist workers’ choirs, and during the Spanish Civil War he collected money for the defenders of the Republic who fought against the Francoists allied with Nazi Germany.
In 1919, Varèse founded the New York Symphony Orchestra, which worked on a cooperative basis for the purpose of disseminating new music, not least in view of the “comprehensive crisis of the performer as a socially responsible being” (Konrad Boehmer); of course, every musician had a share in the profits of the project.
It is wise not to see a composer like Varèse as just a musical revolutionary. And perhaps the best thing is that Varèse’s music is completely unusable for the purposes of the culture industry. Because “Amériques” is a total transgression. Everything is bubbling, everything is being questioned. A siren can be heard throughout the entire piece – no wonder, the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra sets the Berlin Philharmonic on fire.
The monumental orchestra – nine players alone are needed for the restlessly raging percussion, whose instruments also include a bass drum with a wire brush, whips and yes: “lion’s roar”! – rages with confusing sounds, signals and motifs, and the result is an electrifying, great noise that continually increases and subsides for 25 minutes, only to return even louder and more exuberant like a roaring tsunami sound wave, up to a very final, unreal, droning apotheosis of sound violence that sweeps the listeners and everyone and everything along. Storms of cheers.
The São Paulo Symphony Orchestra and its outstanding conductor Thierry Fischer were already at their best with Heitor Villa-Lobos’s “Uirapurú”, but after their interpretation of Varèse’s Solitaire, one would like to hear them again soon in Berlin.
America? Americas!
The concert of the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra can be viewed from 30 August to 29 September in the media library of the Berlin Music Festival be listened to again.
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