France Pageant d’Aix-en-Provence 2025 [4] – Ligeti, Respighi, and Schoeck: Stéphane Degout (baritone), Quatuor Diotima (Yun-Peng Zhao, Léo Marillier [violins], Franck Chevalier [viola], Alexis Descharmes [cello]). Conservatoire Darius Milhaud, Aix-en-Provence, 10.7.2025. (MB)
Ligeti – String Quartet No.1
Respighi – Il tramonto
Schoeck – Notturno, Op.47
For a second excellent live performance on the Pageant d’Aix-en-Provence, the Quatuor Diotima was joined by Stéphane Degout, one other musician whom I’ve by no means heard give something aside from a superb efficiency. Degout joined the quartet for what should rely nearly as ‘early music’ for them: two rarities, each totally new to me, by Ottorino Respighi and Othmar Schoeck. First, nonetheless, we heard the Diotima by itself, in what’s, by comparability, nearly a repertoire work – it actually is within the explicit discipline of twentieth-century quartet writing – the primary of György Ligeti’s two string quartets.
Written in 1953-4, two years earlier than Ligeti departed Hungary for Vienna within the dread 12 months of 1956, the First Quartet emerged right here very a lot out of Bartók’s soundworld, the primary of its twelve brief actions sharing and increasing clearly recognisable – but not reducible – melodic impulse and unease, its scalic writing unnervingly unusual. From these seeds, the remainder of the quartet appeared to spring, as if on a coil. Expressive depth; riotous invention; humour within the tipsy waltz, captivatingly swung; and lots of different hallmarks of the ‘mature’ Ligeti had been all current and thrillingly appropriate, just a little string swarming too. The disconcerting nature of the composer’s Bartókian inheritance continued to make itself manifest, although, not least in unearthly harmonics and a ultimate motion that threatened no less than to transcend. Such a Romantic notion, nonetheless, was by no means going to proceed unchallenged, the Diotima gamers brining us again to earth, if we had ever left it, on the shut.
1914 has inevitable connotations of warfare for European and certainly world historical past. I’m not certain one may hear a lot of that in Respighi’s Il tramonto, neither is there any cause one ought to. Many fancy we hear presentiments no less than way back to Mahler’s Sixth Symphony; but, Essen, Krupp, and Kaiser however, what does that really imply? It issues a sundown, in fact, in translation from Shelley, however in some methods it appears extra forward-looking – no worth judgement – than, say, the ‘Ausklang’ from Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony (1911-5), although there’s what sounds to be, no less than looking back, an apparent kinship with Strauss. Ripe, not over-ripe, it gives quartet writing as wealthy as that for voice, devices right here talking as a lot as baritone or poet, in performances that took nothing as a right. Tristan und Isolde was, maybe unsurprisingly, current for a lot of it, Puccini too, Respighi displaying that his scenic reward want rely neither on giant orchestras nor on apparent word-painting. It naturally helps to take pleasure in a efficiency of such distinction, Degout’s colouristic transformation on the exclamation ‘Tempo!’ a lot greater than mere diminuendo.
1933 is likewise a 12 months so laden with doom for European historical past one can neglect it didn’t essentially appear so on the time — even to many in Germany, nonetheless a lot it ought to. Switzerland was in fact a longstanding haven for refugees and exiles from there and elsewhere, Wagner and Busoni in Zurich included. It may show a haven for modernist music too, Berg’s Lulu receiving its first efficiency in 1937, additionally in Zurich. Othmar Schoeck, who owed a lot to his someday mentor Busoni, didn’t precisely cowl himself with glory within the years to come back. No Nazi himself, he nonetheless had his Eichendorff opera Das Schloss Dürande – to a libretto by an undisputed Nazi (earlier than that, a longstanding member of the extremist DNVP), Hermann Burte – premiered on the Berlin State Opera in 1943. It was a call that not unreasonably enraged many Swiss. Ten years earlier, although, that was a way off.
Schoeck’s Notturno from that 12 months, later championed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, proved fairly a discovery (no less than for these of us for whom it was), one may effectively perceive it being admired, no less than partially, by Berg, not least within the lengthy first motion. It was a really totally different soundworld, as one would anticipate, supplied by Schoeck to Nikolaus Lenau and Gottfried Keller, and by the Quatuor Diotima and Degout to all of them (and one another). Once more, readability of phrases, line, and harmonic movement was matched by palpable emotional dedication and ‘ambiance’. Voice and instrument – as an illustration, Alexis Descharmes’s eloquent cello – duetted in addition to different combos in what usually appeared as a lot quasi-symphony as track cycle. Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony got here to my thoughts greater than as soon as, not least encircling phrases reminiscent of ‘So ganz, wie unsre Liebe, zu Tränen nur gemacht’.
It’s a work of assured mastery, and sounded so, which by no means did fairly what one anticipated with out ever seeming to court docket shock, rhythm within the second motion a working example. If not fairly Bergian, the third motion, ‘Es weht der Wind so kühl’, ushered in a wind of riches, if one can think about such a factor, not so distant. The musicians’ musical and dramatic shaping had been rightly as one. It felt just like the emotional centre in addition to merely being the third of 5 actions. Likewise, the fifth felt like a finale from the outset. A finale can take many types – in multiple sense – however this was one in all them. The trail was by no means apparent but made good sense: typically extra direct than one anticipated, typically much less so. It put me just a little in thoughts of late Schreker. Maybe extra to the purpose – my level, anyway – it made me eager to listen to Degout in Wagner.
Mark Berry
