Music
Festival for all the senses
Robin Holloway
Aldeburgh remains unique and special among music festivals. The little town is humdrum, with no seductive richness of cathedral close or mercantile splendour. The surrounding countryside is austere. Only the sea and the sky, evoked to perfection in the interludes from Peter Grimes and the desolate greys of Curlew River, are beautiful. The visitor is compel- led to turn towards the music with re- freshed and intensified concentration.
No setting could be more conducive to the spirit of Alexander Goehr's Triptych of music-theatre pieces, given twice during the first week by Richard Bernas and Music Projects/London in a production (directed by Lucy Bailey, designed by Emilyn Hill) that elicits maximal effect from minimal means. Even so Naboth's Vineyard made a daunting start. The harsh story (Kings i 21) is told in a stylisation uneasily conjoining slapstick with distanc- ing Latin dialogue, a Lehrstuck from the didactic Weimar Twenties with music suit- ably grim and anonymous. Shadowplay, the middle piece, is altogether more pleasurable. The tight little box that repre- sented the vineyard now became the cave of Plato's famous fable in Republic VII. One saw the slave first as a silhouette, which turned into a real person as he began to climb, bursting through the box's paper ceiling and hoisting himself naked up a rope into freedom, a bold and vertiginous performance. Only when the apparition spoke did the magic break, for his text, all callow rapture, remains in marked contra- distinction to the ecstatic fluidity of the music (its surprisingly Debussyan piano- part exceptionally well played), the start- ling sight, and of course the sublimity of the myth itself. The third and finest piece, Sonata about Jerusalem, brings to life a touching episode telling how the Jews exiled in 12th-century Baghdad take to their roofs (the black box again, with ladders reaching up on either side) under the delusion that they will be wafted home to their holy city. Here Goehr's curiously wayward gifts find exact- ly the right subject to realise them to complete advantage. The women's Latin refrain is not now a mere notion from the textbook of alienation. It frames and punc- tuates to powerful purpose the central episode whose music shines with a lucid singularity of harmony and texture — half Scriabin, half Kurt Weill, wholly Goehrisch — fusing, with the inspired simplicity of the stage picture, into an unforgettably poignant image of hope and disappointment.
The Festival's first week ended with an orchestral concert by the expanded Lon- don Sinfonietta under Oliver Knussen in a sold-out Snape Maltings with a programme whose flair and daring is not often matched in the metropolis. The main work was the Concerto for Orchestra by Elliott Carter (he and Goehr are 'resident composers' this year). This masterpiece has not till now, in its 21 years of existence, had in this country the performance it deserves. Its combination of hyper-complex facture with vast windy gesture and the fluidity of a living organism was realised by Knussen and his players with such sensory headiness that one seemed to be touching, even smelling this astonishing music, alongside the apprehension of its mere sound. Colin Matthews's Cortege followed, a masterly study in rhetoric for large orchestra, single- mindedly black as the Carter is multi- coloured, perhaps overlong in reaching its shattering climax whose reiterated thun- derblows suggest the subtitle Over the Top. The concert had begun with Britten's perennially youthful Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra and ended, successfully disregarding the obvious applause-raiser, with Jets x, Debussy's marvellous ballet of erotic teasing in ambiguous twilight. Knus- sen steered delicately between swoons and tickles, and added a nervy aggression, in places bordering on violence, quite in keeping with the score. The fashion for X-raying such music a la Boulez is now a thing of the past — this performance proves once again that precision need not preclude honey.
The concert as a whole confirms Knus- sen's talents as a master conductor on the grandest as well as the tiniest scale. Thank- fully Radio Three, whose attendance upon important outside concerts has been pretty erratic in recent years, was able to prevent it from disappearing into thin air.
The music of Elliott Carter and Alexan- der Goehr figures in most of the remaining concerts of the Aldeburgh Festival (box office 0728 452935).
`Anyway, there I was, stuck in a bunker near the 15th fairway . . .
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