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12 Jul, 2017
Louis Andriessen - La Commedia
We are supposed to put the music of Louis Andriessen into the box labelled 'minimalism' but there is nothing really very minimalist about La Commedia. It is a massive work, extremely rich with ideas and it shines with an enormous generosity of spirit. Not that I would call minimalism mean spirited, it was in itself a step outside of the box of European chromaticism and had to establish it's own stripped-down form. But with La Commedia the composer is practicing a different kind of reduction.
Gone, for example, is Andriessen's insistence that all strings be banished from his instrumentation leaving only 'loud sounding instruments' - the concept behind De Volharding, his 'terrifying' 21st century orchestra. Instead, the twin ensembles of Asko and Schonberg - including strings - provide such an extraordinary range of colours that I, for one, am left mystified at times as to what exactly I am listening to. I find Andriessen's approach to harmony frequently astonishing and now he seems to have discovered some way of blending voices that I will just call sheer magic. Also gone is the composer's insistence for singers to perform without vibrato. Having said that, this is no departure from business as usual for Andriessen. There is a reason, a necessity, for these self-imposed rules to be broken. The vast sweep of La Commedia surely demands it.
The work is described as 'a film opera in five parts'. This is the first 'film opera' that I am aware of and I concur that there is no other way to describe it, we have a new genre. The credits for the film go to Hal Hartley. There is electronic music by Anke Brouwer and there are the eight voices of Synergy Vocals and four soloists. The texts are from Dante, Vondel, the Old Testament and others.
The first part opens in the 'City of Dis' - the burning city in hell populated by... buskers! I confess that I wept from the outset as I watched this rag-tag bunch of musos scrape a living, sharing out the coins. Some young people are handing out political flyers and the camera catches the word RESIST. Is hell Amsterdam, now? In another scene, Lucifer himself is counting out a wad of 100 Euro notes, he looks a bit like a burned out trader from the pit of a major investment bank. Andriessen is noted for his left wing politics and he pulls no punches here.
Part of the action is happening on film, in black and white, while that film is also being projected onto a screen in the concert hall where the rest of the story unfolds, also on film, in colour and 'live'. There are two layers of reality intertwined throughout and together they create the frame for La Commedia. It works very well. You get a sense that one reality is, perhaps, being manipulated by events elsewhere. And Andriessen's often unearthly music weaves it all together, from Lucifer to Luce Etterna.
As I get to know this music, new layers of the comedy reveal themselves. Little pieces of melody and familiar lines, chords, clusters, seem to turn up literally in disguise (dark glasses, a fake moustache..) something slightly more than straight musical reworking. There is a lot of outright theft going on as well, in fact, it is all rather irreverent and somehow tongue-in-cheek. It's all a pose, a construction, something emphasised by the set - Paul Clay, and costumes - Robby Duiveman, which put us on a building site. Both the Asko Ensemble and Schonberg Ensemble are steered through events by one extraordinary conductor, Reinbert de Leeuw, who definitely "gets it", to quote the closing song. Mention has to be made of the massively enjoyable performance by Cristina Zavalloni who is Dante (yes that's a woman playing a man - like pantomime) and the wonderful delivery that Jeroen Willems achieves as Lucifer, absolutely believable.
Louis Andriessen's music is, of course, minimalist. But minimalism is more than half a century into it's life now. It can do anything, be anything and sound like anything. I would say this piece breaks new ground. It's playing fast and loose on nearly every front and has stepped firmly into very adventurous new territory. I sincerely hope that La Commedia will come to be seen as one of the seminal works of this century.
07 Oct, 2020
Bowie's Weirdest Ever Album
Don't be without David Bowie's weirdest ever album. I'm a massive fan but I have to say I don't know what he was thinking when he made this. It fails on many grounds but I can't say a word against it because it's Bowie and Bowie is a warts-and-all artist. If you are a David Lynch fan you will need to get it anyway as it contains 'I'm Deranged", the theme music for "Lost Highway" - says it all!
31 Oct, 2017
Louis Andriessen Asks Another Question
Louis Andriessen has said himself that he thinks his music poses more questions than it answers. I think that is a very sane position. I don't think art has the answers and, as Andriessen also admits, if it did - things in the world would be rather different.
Described as a "Grotesque stagework in 9 scenes", Theatre of the World introduces us to the life of a seventeenth century Jesuit scholar, Athanasius Kircher. He is portrayed as something of an overblown fool in the libretto by Helmut Krausser (b 1964); "He never destroyed a good story with facts" declares Voltaire at the end of the piece, but as the sleeve notes tell us, he was a prolific and hugely popular author despite this. "Theatre of The World" is Catholic doctrine of the time, the idea that "All the world is a stage.." representing God as a kind of divine playwright, a determinist manifesto if you like. And so we are introduced to an ageing Kircher wandering in a Vatican graveyard who bumps into Pope Innocent XI - one of his patrons - and the Devil. Much fun lies ahead as the Devil takes them all on a world tour, encountering witches, young lovers, a busy hangman, China, the Tower of Babel and Kircher's Dutch publicist phoning him (yes) from Amsterdam. There's a few questions for a start.
There is something about this production which begs comparison with Andriessen's last stagework La Commedia, not least because the Dark Prince is again one of the central characters driving the narrative. In this new work, Satan has disguised himself as a young boy. "I think I am an orphan.." he declares to Kircher, enquiring who's son he is. Delicious irony is set up from the start as the foolish Kircher fails to recognise the boy despite ridiculous clues, while we the audience know all along.
The piece opens with a falling riff from bass trombones that is revisted, twisted and extended throughout the work. Much of the voicing is for wind with brilliant passages for bass clarinets and bassoons, providing a spooky ground for Kircher's "necropolis". It soon gets interrupted. It becomes a futile excercise trying to guess Andriessen's music; the arrival of the witches, accompanied by saxophone, being a great moment in the middle of the lovers' scene. The way out of that, musically, is also quite a treat.
Like other stageworks by Andriessen, the text is polyglot, six languages being collaged, maybe collided, in much the same way as the composer's music skips and jumps across four centuries. You will need the libretto or you will be utterly lost. Unlike La Commedia, I find this work is language heavy, far more reliant on the narrative to carry you along. The nine scenes range from 6 or 7 minutes to just under 15 minutes, making the journey quite choppy, and more or less every scene contains the central characters which is quite intense listening for an hour and a half. Having got that off my chest, Andriessen's genius just goes on, and this is, firstly, something that is made for the stage. The performances are fantastic and engrossing and Leigh Melrose must be congratulated for his extraordinary portrayal of the unbalanced Kircher, Marcel Beekman is appropriately divine as the Pope, and Lindsay Kesselman's devil is brilliantly cheeky. A host of others appear including the mezzo, Cristina Zavalloni as Mexican poet and mystic, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, providing pure gold.
Why do we need to know about Anthansius Kircher? I don't think I've worked out a good answer yet, but he reminds me a bit of someone I know. If Kircher were alive today and announced on social media that he had successfully squared the circle, how many followers do you think he'd have?