Star violinist’s shocking and chaotic concert
‘Do not bore your audience” is the first and only rule of concert curation, says Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violinist and featured artist at this year’s Aldeburgh Festival. “Bye-bye Beethoven”, her event created with the aid of four German theatre practitioners, suggests she has another: shock the hell out of them.
It began with the Snape Maltings hall in darkness, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra nowhere to be seen. The sustained nocturnal string harmonies of Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, and the mysterious repeated “question” from the trumpet, crept into the air. The players filed on, still in darkness, playing something that was odd but somehow familiar. It was the last movement of Haydn’s Farewell Symphony backwards (a witty touch as the players actually leave the stage in a normal, right-way-round performance).
In a breathless rush, more oddities followed: the whispered recitations of John Cage’s Living Room Music, the grave back-and-forth in György Kurtág’s Ligatura-message. Then finally came the thing we all thought would be “normal”; Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. In fact, it began strangely, with Beethoven’s own disruptive timpani strokes made much more so and, little by little, chaos enveloped the piece.
Extra cadenzas of modernist strangeness popped up, the players’ restive movements on stage adding to the sense of disaster round the corner. Eventually, the disaster arrived as the back “wall” moved scarily towards us, driving players from the stage, while Beethoven’s piece melted into electronic howls and stopped dead.
If Kopatchinskaja wanted to épater les bourgeois, she certainly succeeded. Beyond that, was there a deeper message? Was the obliterating wall the march of history, about to consign classical to oblivion? It’s hard to say, but the haunted quality of Kopatchinskaja’s playing ensured the mystery was limned with poetically intense moments.
More satisfying was the concert in Orford Church from the Piatti Quartet. They gave a delightfully soft-grained performance of Haydn’s Bird Quartet, and a hugely intense Beethoven’s Quartetto Serioso, with contemporary pieces in between. Simon Holt’s Fourth Quartet Cloud House, here receiving its world premiere, conjured an imaginary walk through a real-life abandoned house on a Welsh mountain.
In the music’s sudden shocks and eerie repeating ticks one felt the strangeness of finding signs of life frozen in time. And sometimes a jolt of familiar harmony brought a feeling of the ordinary amid the strangeness.
Harder to grasp but no less intriguing was Emily Howard’s Afference, a piece that tries to conjure in sound the workings of our nervous system. You’d think a piece based on science would be cold, but it suggested human qualities of yearning and surprise and memory. If we could listen in to our nervous system at work, it might sound something like her piece.