Rihm and Lachenmann
Huddersfield contemporary music festival ****
Finding a successor to Richard Steinitz, who started Huddersfield's Contemporary Music Festival in 1978 and is stepping down as artistic director, will not be easy: Steinitz has unflaggingly nurtured the festival, until now it ranks with the best in Europe, and with almost saintly open-mindedness has encompassed the whole spectrum of new music in his programming. Consistently, too, Huddersfield has provided crucial opportunities to sample composers from both sides of the Atlantic whose music is otherwise hardly heard in Britain; thus the first weekend of this year's programme focused on Wolfgang Rihm and Helmut Lachenmann, pivotal figures in German music today.
It is a piquant coupling. Each acknowledges the achievement of Luigi Nono, who died in 1990, yet each takes a very different slant on what it means. While the astonishingly prolific Rihm (born in 1952) celebrates the musical freedom with which Nono composed his late works, the polemical Lachenmann, 65 next week, studied with Nono in the late 1950s and took on not only his radical political agenda but also his rigorous approach to musical organisation, scrutinising the act of composition itself in ideologi cal terms. It makes Lachenmann's music hard to confront, and in a work such as the 1985 Ausklang, a monumental piece for piano and orchestra which Uli Wiget played with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Jac van Steen in Huddersfield Town Hall on Sunday, tough-going indeed.
The precision of his aural imagination and subtlety of his gestures had been easier to grasp in a programme by the wonderful Ensemble Modern, conducted by Dominque My in St Paul's Hall earlier in the day. There was a delicate percussion solo Intèrieur I, from 1966 dazzlingly played by Rumi Ogawa-Helferich, and the substantial "Zwei Gufuhle..." Musik mit Leonardo from 1992. In the latter, a text by Leonard Da Vinci is atomised into syllables and delivered by a pair of narrators while the ensemble creates a dazzling patchwork of sounds, some conventionally produced, others obtained by striking, stroking or blowing unexpected parts of the instruments. The fragments of the text dissolve into the textures in a teasingly allusive way.
It's all very different from Rihm's freewheeling approach. The BBC Symphony's programme coupled the Lachenmann with the superbly played British premiere of Rihm's latest big orchestral work, Vers une symphonie fleuve IV, a single movement of unstoppable momentum and power, which pays homage to the symphonic tradition yet finds territory of its own to explore too.
The finest score of the weekend had been presented in solitary splendour on Saturday in the first of the Ensemble Modern's concerts; Rihm's Jagden und Formen is a 45-minute single-movement work, finished two months ago, of astonishing power and resource; as one idea slides into the next, and massive, heaving textures give way to the most delicate solos, the tension never slackens.
Since the opening of the Lawrence Batley Theatre opera has become a feature of Huddersfield too, but this year's planned premiere, of John Casken's Tolstoy-based God's Liar had to be abandoned when funding collapsed. In its place came a production by the Toronto-based Autumn Leaf Company, of Claude Vivier's 1979 "rituel de mort" Kopernikus, which was staged at the Almeida Festival in 1985 but not seen in Britain since. For reasons that escape me, the French-Canadian Vivier (1940-83) is becoming a cult figure. Kopernikus and its mimsy story about a child's dreams and illusions, told in a mixture of nursery-speak and pseudo-philosophical posturing, is precious and ridiculous, while the naive charm of the score, heavily indebted to his teacher Stockhausen, wears thin very quickly indeed.
Radio 3 will broadcast the BBC Symphony and the Ensemble Modern concerts over the next three weeks.
