It was confirmed in January that Simon Rattle is to succeed the late Mariss Jansons as chief conductor of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. He will not take up his post until the beginning of the 2023-24 season, but this month Rattle is making his first appearances in Munich since his appointment was announced. He began with two concerts on the same day that were live-streamed as part of Bavarian Radio’s Musica Viva series, one of the longest established new-music events in Europe.
In the first programme Messiaen’s monumental Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum, perhaps sounding more confined, less overwhelmingly apocalyptic, as streamed from the Gasteig concert hall than it can in a more cavernous acoustic, was paired with a world premiere. Ondřej Adámek’s Where Are You? was a joint commission between Musica Viva and the London Symphony Orchestra, which is planning to perform it in London in September.
It was written for Rattle’s wife, the mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená, and sometimes seems more like a slick dramatic scena than a thoughtful orchestral song cycle. The 11 linked settings – texts in Aramaic, Czech, Spanish, Moravian dialect, English and Sanskrit, questioning the existence of God – often atomise the words or bury them in flurries of vocal clicks and breathy sounds, while the orchestra creates an alienated sound world around them. But it’s unfocussed stylistically, juxtaposing parodies of east European folk music with an echo of 1960s music theatre (when Kožená declaims through a loud-hailer), or combining Lachenmann-like textures with “found” sounds – the percussionist “plays” an aerosol can at one point. It never all adds up.
Later the concert in the Herkulessaal began unexpectedly with Purcell’s Funeral Music for Queen Mary, sung with chaste beauty by the Bavarian Radio Chorus, which served as a prelude to Georg Friedrich Haas’s In Vain. In a pre-concert interview Rattle described Haas’s hour-long work, first performed in 2000, as “one of the few pieces from this century that we already know will have a life for all the centuries”. Its score specifies a detailed lighting plot, including two lengthy sections that are to be performed in total darkness, but the requirements of video streaming inevitably diluted those effects. What survived intact in this immaculate performance, though, was the enormous power of the music, with its writhing microtones, vertiginous climaxes, moments of diatonic purity and almost Wagnerian grandeur. Rattle’s enthusiasm for it didn’t seem at all misplaced.
