Sounds to Unsettle the Soul

It seemed like a fairly ordinary program for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. There was comforting, familiar music--Schumann’s Second Symphony, Mozart’s early Symphony No. 25--along with a reprise of Gyorgy Ligeti’s celebrated Violin Concerto, a work by one of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s favorite composers and given its American premiere by him and the orchestra four years ago. This time, the performance was turned over to Markus Stenz, the young German conductor making his debut with the orchestra, though a conductor like Salonen with a reputation for being a lucid modernist and painstaking detail man.

Still, these are strange times we live in--just look at the news of the week--and both the music and making of it Friday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion offered surreal comment on our surreal moment in history.

In particular was the relevance of Ligeti’s concerto, which was completed in 1992 but felt made for last week. The Hungarian composer, who was born in 1923, is a modernist who is fascinated by clocks and machines and the workings of the cosmos. He loves to set up cockeyed patterns, different processes working on different time scales, and follow the result, which is something like the musical realization of the visual fractal patterns that come from taming chaos.

But Ligeti also is a survivor, a composer whose music remembers a youth in thrall of Bartok and Hungarian folk song, Soviet artistic oppression and avant-garde rebellion. And all that, too, is reclaimed in the Violin Concerto, a score in which sweet nostalgic melody can be invaded by all manner of bizarre phenomena.

Indeed, the concerto offers example after example of how our personal experiences influence our expectations of nature and the cosmos, and how, conversely, the natural world imposes itself upon our own experiences. The piece utilizes but a small orchestra, and every player does something downright odd from time to time. The clarinets shift over to eerie ocarinas; horn players are asked to find natural harmonics; string players are required to adapt strange mistunings.

The overall result, unsettling as it may be, is also thrilling, and it was thrillingly played by the Philharmonic and Bulgarian violinist Saschko Gawriloff, for whom it was written and who has performed it some 70 times and made an award-winning recording of it with Pierre Boulez for Deutsche Grammophon. The demands on soloist and orchestra (the elite small band was made up mainly of first-chair players) are extraordinary, but Gawriloff tossed off the wildest passages with ease, and Stenz demanded concentrated support.

Surrounding a demanding modern concerto with two well-worn symphonies is the usual way for orchestras and their audiences to cling tenaciously to classical music’s glorious past. However, Stenz, who is 32 and a specialist in new music, clearly doesn’t see it that way. On the surface his interpretations of Mozart and Schumann, modernist in the enforcement of ultra-clean lines and transparent textures, were reminiscent of the dutiful, businesslike performances of 18th and 19th century music that Boulez used to give when he was music director of the New York Philharmonic in the ‘70s.

But, in fact, Stenz is far stranger. He appears deeply connected with the musics, conducting in gestures that indicated the sweep and shape of lines. He is often very slow, but he is never romantic. Rather the tempos seem to be for analytical reasons, time being needed to dig deep into textures and harmonies.

The overriding impression is a love for pattern. This was particularly strong in the Mozart, as Stenz continually balanced phrase against phrase, everything clipped and ordered in severe degree. Schumann has less opportunity for such patterning, but there was enough for the performance to be equally unusual; the slow movement seemed to contemplate a still eternity, like that of a comet watcher not knowing quite where to look and not caring.

The orchestra may not have been happy sacrificing robustness for such hard musical edges, but it worked hard to accommodate Stenz and sounded different than I have ever hear it sound, as did, of course, the Mozart and Schumann symphonies.

Stenz--who is music director of the new music group London Sinfonietta and who has a reputation in the opera house for two composers of radical extremes, Mozart and Hans Werner Henze--is about to take up the music directorship of the Melbourne Symphony. We will obviously be hearing much more from him, and it looks as though it will be a fascinating career to follow. The weirdness, it seems, has just begun.