The problem with programming a day devoted to Wolfgang Rihm’s music is not deciding what to include, but what be can be excluded from an output of more than 400 scores, about half of which are for various chamber combinations. The Wigmore Hall opted to build each of its three concerts around some of the outstanding performers with whom Rihm has worked regularly over the years.
There had to be a programme given by the Arditti Quartet; that included the Tenth String Quartet and Fetzen, the cycle of pieces for accordion and strings, and before it came recitals featuring clarinettist and composer Jörg Widmann, a former pupil of Rihm, and the tenor Christoph Prégardien.
The day began with the UK premiere of the Sextet for clarinet, horn and strings, which was composed for Widmann, the horn player Bruno Schneider and the Quatuor Danel, and first performed last autumn. It’s typical of recent Rihm, inhabiting a dark, brooding world on which the whole weight of musical history seems to be pressing down, and like the work that ended Widmann’s programme, the Four Studies for Clarinet Quintet (a deceptively unassuming title for what is by any standards a powerful and substantial piece of chamber music) it invokes the ghosts of a range of composers from Brahms onwards.
Rihm’s expressive centre of gravity now seems fixed quite firmly in that post-romantic, expressionist language of the turn of the 20th century. The starting point for many of the songs in Prégardien’s remarkable recital with pianist Ulrich Eisenlohr – from the 1999 cycle Ende der Handschrift, settings of poems by Heiner Müller, which he interwove with Schubert’s late songs on poems by Ernst Schulze, and the cycle Das Rot (1990) which was followed with the Heine settings from Schwanengesang – was that of early Schoenberg and Berg. The juxtaposition with the greatest of all Lieder composers worked perfectly, while Prégardien’s acute, concentrated response to every detail of every song was a wonder in itself.
