Мир современной музыки. Хрестоматия для чтения на английском языке. Учебно-методические материалы для студентов музыкальных вузов и факультетов

that time it has been the orchestra's backer, and administers the funds made available by the ministry of education.

Of course even in an orchestra of nothing but cellists the conductor is the most important person. Here too he ultimately determines where the music is heading. The atmosphere in the orchestra very much depends on his way of dealing with musicians, organizing rehearsals, and preparing for concerts. So apart from his competence, the cellists also appreciate the wit and enthusiasm of Hans Peter Pairott, co-initiator of this unusual ensemble. He has headed the band ever since it was founded.

There are also section-leaders responsible for tuning and a concert-master - just like a "proper" orchestra, still dependent on violins, violas, and double basses. Those responsible for tuning discuss with the conductor the year's plans for rehearsals, concerts, and traveling. Then a concert-master is sought, so-to-speak playing first violin with the cello.

This "first of all cellists" is a model for the orchestra's members, so this role scarcely differs from that of the "usual" leader at the head of the violins. Together with the conductor and section leaders, he decides on the programmes to be played, and not infrequently - which is the big difference - writes such works. There are in fact original works for a cello orchestra, but one of the concertmaster's essential tasks is to arrange compositions or - more important still - to write pieces for such an ensemble. Other composers who heard the orchestra in concerts have also often written new works especially for this band.

During the week-long rehearsal periods, the emphasis is on coordinating orchestral members of very different abilities - from school children to professional musicians. "Is that necessary?" is the most frequently asked question. And the answer is of course: "Yes, that's how things must be". Nevertheless there are also school children who sometimes feel that it's all too much, and professionals who want even greater precision. In the midst of all this stands the conductor who unwaveringly demonstrates the right way to the shared objective. The final concert after the rehearsal period is an initial peak of concentration before the orchestra goes on tour with its programme. Endlessly long bus trips and settling into new quarters, trial runs in an

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unfamiliar concert-hall, putting on concert clothes, snatching a bite, and then performing - Things are the same for the cello orchestra as for any other ensemble that sets out on its travels. And yet the Schleswig-Holstein Cello Orchestra's concert trips are not vocational routine far from home as with a purely professional orchestra. Instead - and that is inevitable with such a diverse ensemble - they are characterised by players' awareness of fulfilling a particularly creative role in works that have often been especially composed. The occasions for the orchestra's appearances are thus not arbitrary concert dates. For instance, a concert tour of France is at present being planned, and thirty French cellists will also be involved.

Thomas Wiese /Zeitschrift für Musik und Eltern

The LaSalle Quartet Revisited

Legend has it that the LaSalle Quartet got its name in a telephone booth. That was in 1949. Walter Levin, the highly active first violin, wanted to offer his just established string quartet to an agent who promptly asked for the group's name. However the musicians hadn't given any thought to that. Levin looked around rather helplessly and saw the street name: La Salle. Why not? That was the place where they practiced.

Today, half a century later, the name of a once famous quartet is again threatened with disappearance. The group decided to call it a day in 1988; the musicians are now in their eighties; and once standard-setting performances are increasingly vanishing from the market. However an echo still occasionally reaches us as now in the live recording of a concert the LaSalle Quartet gave at the 1976 Salzburg Festival. The programme could have served as their visiting card. Everything is there: late Beethoven, late Schubert, and Witold Lutoslawski as (at that time) a contemporary composer. The virtues of musicians Walter Levin, Henry Meyer, Peter Kamnitzer, and Lee Fiser are also present here.

Schubert's Quartet Movement in С minor D. 703 is usually played fast, racing through the heavens and hells the work presents. The music is over even before the ear has got used to that. The LaSalle musicians chose a more restrained tempo (yet far removed

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from any ponderous-ness) and develop the drama from this central vantage-point, swinging between galvanic despair and blissful release. Then followed Lutoslawski's Quartet, beginning with octave figures which structure the piece. The four players present the crackling and shadowy pizzicati with a truly remarkable range of plucked and struck sounds. The work rushes onwards in feverish excitement. It is no longer melodies, lines, or harmonies that are composed here; those aspects submit to transformations in density, irregular rhythms, and physical intensity. The LaSalle musicians played as if the work had been written for them, and they in fact gave the first performance in 1963.

At that time the absolutely astonished Lutoslawski said of their first encounter: "In the hotel where we met it was decided that the piece should first be played without any interruption. I was so affected by this experience that I sat there almost without moving. Never had I believed that my quartet could be presented with such artistic perfection, with such total sensitivity. My wife uttered a little cry and I could only say: "Leave it as it is. Don't change anything".

The LaSalle Quartet turned out to be outstanding guides through the history of modernism. With their repertoire and interpretive style these musicians communicate just a trace of high and late romanticism, of Brahms and Hugo Wolf, throughout the Second Viennese School and right up to the late Luigi Nono. Almost everything appeared on Deutsche Gramophone, but the company has not looked after this treasure well and not many of these recordings are now available.

Entire generations of listeners have been influenced by the LaSalle recording of all the string quartets by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, which originally appeared in 1971 and was reissued as a CD box entitled The Second Viennese School in 1987. An enormous amount of editorial research went into this. Ursula von Rauchhaupt combed Viennese archives and compiled a booklet of several hundred pages from the letters, sketches, lectures, and analyses she found hidden away there and hitherto unknown. That gave rise to the probably unique situation where musicologists have for over two decades now quoted from texts assembled for a gramophone recording. The CD box contains the masterly early quartets by

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Schoenberg and Webern, the transition to atonality with what was thought to be Schoenberg's scandalous F minor quartet where for the first time in the history of music a soprano accompanies the strings, singing what are key words for that time: "I feel the air of another planet". Berg's opus 3 quartet is here as well - and so too, above all, are Webern's milestones: the Miniatures op. 5 and the Bagatelles op. 9, forms compressed to the uttermost which Schoenberg viewed as "giving expression to a novel in a gesture, to happiness in breathing a single sigh of relief. Finally there are Schoenberg's late abstractions in classical forms, Berg's Lyric Suite, and Webern's 1938 Quartet, which became the jumping-off point for the avant-garde after world war two.

There were biographical reasons for the LaSalle Quartet playing new music so extensively. As Jews first violin Walter Levin, born at Berlin in 1924, and viola-player Peter Kamnitzer were directly threatened under Nazi rule but managed to escape in time. Henry Meyer, born at Dresden in 1923, was not so lucky. He survived many concentration camps including Auschwitz. After liberation he declared: "The greatest number of lovers of chamber music are to be found in the two countries which are the home of such music - Germany and Austria. Did I really want to go back to those countries and give concerts, knowing that the people who murdered my family might be sitting in the audience?" The Quartet launched its career by playing pieces which the Nazis had banned as "degenerate art". They regularly commissioned works from avantgarde composers, and many of these became reference points within the repertoire.

When the LaSalle Quartet called it a day in 1988, three of the founder-members were still there after having played together for forty years. Another legend fits in here. Towards the end of their time together the four musicians insisted that their contracts should include a clause stating that during concert tours they must always be booked into different hotels. That didn't indicate any breakdown in relationships. It merely accorded with the astute understanding that the most brutal marital strife always gets under way at the breakfast table.

Frank Hilberg/Die Zeit

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The Adventure of New Music

In June the Arditti Quartet was presented the 1999 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in a ceremony at Munich's Cuvilliestheater. This 250,000 DM prize, established in 1972, is one of most highly endowed awards in the sphere of art music. Tribute was thus paid to the achievements of a string quartet which for a quarter of a century now has done everything possible for contemporary music.

Among the verbal displays of strength dating from Pierre Boulez's radical years are both the demand that opera houses should be blown up and the assertion that the string quartet is dead. The man who can feel most amused by that today is Irvine Arditti. If this genre, looking back over an extensive tradition, is at present lively in a way long unparalleled, that is mainly thanks to the tireless work of the quartet he established in 1974 and whose first violin he still remains. Of course in the meantime Boulez has also realized how wrong his diagnosis was. Awarding the Siemens Music Prize to the Arditti Quartet happened with Boulez's approval since he is a member of the jury.

There have certainly already been a number of ensembles which devoted themselves to contemporary music, such as the legendary LaSalle Quartet, that served the Ardittis as a model in the initial years. However the Ardittis set about matters more consistently than anyone else. With just a few exceptions, they have always concentrated on 20th century repertoire. That does not mean a decoupling from tradition. They know and affirm the legacy of Schubert and the late Beethoven up to Bartok and the Second Viennese School. They also expect that of the composers whose works they play. They have always kept clear of Crossover, Minimalism, and the like.

The Arditti Quartet's repertoire is enormous. It comprises more than 300 works by 340 composers and in addition some 120 string trios and pieces with additional instruments or orchestra. They gave the first performance of many of these compositions, and much has been directly stimulated by their existence. From the start the Quartet also played for the radio and recordings. Scarcely any other ensemble specializing in New Music is today so well represented On

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CD as the Arditti Quartet. The list of releases comprises around sixty titles, and the Ardittis are represented with single works on some 50 other compact discs.

At the start of the nineties the Quartet launched the ambitious project of documenting on CD the history of the string quartet in the 20th century (at that time for Disques Montaigne, a small Paris-based label). 32 titles then appeared with the works of the Viennese School (including some with an extended chamber music line-up) and of a whole series of celebrated contemporaries such as Xenakis, Lutoslawski, Kagel, Lachenmann, Rihm, and Femeyhough. Less wellknown or younger composers are also represented: Jonathan Harvey, Julio Estrada, Pascal Dusapin, James Dillon, and Marco Stroppa. And of course Luigi Nono whose string quartet has in the meantime attained a kind of cult status as an auratic symbol of a time of cultural change. The stylistic richness and ramified traditions within which the creation of string quartets is articulated today are particularly well depicted in the CD compilations portraying individual countries or cultural regions under such titles as "From Italy", "From Scandinavia", or "From the USA". Innumerable regionally important composers, who are nonetheless often neglected in the big festivals and centres of New Music, are thus reunited with an international discourse of modernism. This kind of "field research", pursued by the Arditti Quartet on national music scenes, is unique among New Music ensembles across the world.

When the French company Auvidis bought out Disques Montaigne a few years ago, the end seemed imminent for this project conceived as a work in progress. Turnover took precedence over cultural responsibilities, and undertakings were put aside. However recently renewed optimism has been announced. Auvidis wants to take up the cause again, and as a token of good will the company is now bringing out two recordings hitherto held back: Chamber music for strings by Bruno Maderna and Hans Zender's "Hölderlin lesen".

Further projects are being planned.

In the past the Ardittis have also worked regularly with other firms, usually specialized small labels. For Etcetera Records in 1988 they issued the four string quartets Elliott Carter had written up to that time, and for Mode Records (New York) works by John Cage and a

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piece with an interesting combination of performers: "The Seventh Seed", a chamber opera by Hilda Paredes from Mexico. With instrumental forces limited to string quartet and percussion, the ensemble can focus completely on the restrained sounds and wealth of colour in this atmospherically dense score. Wergo brought out Henze's five quartets and produced a standard-setting recording of Ligeti's two quartets. In this recording, made at London in 1978, the characteristic qualities of the Ardittis' playing are already clearly apparent: sovereign structuring of time, almost inexhaustible variability of sound and articulation down to the most subtle detail, linked with a previously never achieved playful lightness. The more recent version of these works for Sony may seem even more masterly in terms of structure and technique, but all the essentials were already present in the earlier recording.

In this approach, largely liberated from the German espressivo tradition, is to be found a difference between the Arditti Quartet and its model, the LaSalle Quartet. It marks a change of both generation and epoch - a change from Central European modernism rooted in the 19th century dialectic concept of progress to the media age's internationalized understanding of music. This view no longer recognizes closed areas of tradition but instead approaches the immense diversity of musical appearances with a pragmatic attitude aware of the "abundance of the moment". However the great tradition remains vital despite everything. The sober, almost scientifically experimental precision with which the Arditti Quartet opens up ways into new territory is revealed in a declaration by Luigi Nono, reported by Helmut Lachenmann at a Berlin Nono symposium in 1991. The Ardittis precisely determined the long fermata in the "Fragmente - Stille an Diotima" string quartet, and then divided the bow-lengths by the number of seconds, making so-and-so many centimetres of bow per second - and then the prolonged single sound becomes a tonal event. Nono is said to have learned to hear his piece completely anew thanks to the Ardittis' playing. These musicians have in the meantime gained their reputation of intrepid pathfinders through the jungle of even the most complex scores with interpretations of works by such composers as Ferneyhough, Xenakis, Carter, or Lachenmann. Ferneyhough's second quartet was their first

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encounter with a highly complex piece. Ever since in 1979 they invested some sixty hours of rehearsal in a work lasting under ten minutes, they have not been deterred by anything. Especially as they constantly prepare their performances in conjunction with the composer. That guarantees a high degree of authenticity and has also led to fruitful interaction between ensemble and composers. Many prominent scores from recent decades would probably not have come into existence without the Ardittis.

The Quartet's history is thus on the one hand a story of unceasing expansion of musical and technical possibilities. On the other, the group has always played - without blinkers - works dedicated to anything but an aesthetic of complexity: quartets by Gubaidulina, Henze, Castiglioni, Maxwell Davies, and many others. That refutes the charge of aesthetic narrowness, sometimes to be heard from people who themselves adhere to an unspoken limited aesthetic. In today's music there are things which would have been inconceivable 25 years ago - says Irvine Arditti, referring to the principle to which the Quartet has been committed since the start: openness towards the new. The adventure of New Music continues.

Max Nyffeler/Neue Zürcher Zeitung

An Idiosyncratic Interpreter

Hans-Andre Stamm: He played the Klais organ at Bonn's Minster as part of the "Bonn as Organ City" series where celebrated interpreters were engaged. Stamm attracted attention at the age of 11 with his first organ concert. He made his first gramophone recording when he was 13; at 15 became a master pupil at the Liege royal conservatory; and at 16 gave a concert before 4,000 people in Paris. He was the first young person to be allowed to play the celebrated organ at Notre Dame. Since then he has made many recordings (sometimes of his own arrangements) and has performed his own compositions.

Нans-Andre Stamm, the Leverkusen musician, has been internationally successful as a pianist and still more as an organist, thereby refuting the thesis that child prodigies do not last. Even though he first performed at the age of eleven, today in his mid-

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thirties he is also a fascinating interpreter whose spontaneity provokes enthusiasm - as his concert on the big Klais organ recently demonstrated. He has always pursued his own ideas and objectives rather than ever submitting unresistingly to the usual "music business".

The concert at Bonn also provided clear indications of that. His skilful adaptations of string chamber music for the organ demonstrated the imaginative master of sounds. To be sure, there modeling of the adagio from Mozart's wonderful G minor quintet touched on holy ground, but that transcription only served as a suitable "prelude" to the fugal rondo from the G major string quartet whose linearity was succinctly stressed on the organ. Stamm's adaptation of the slow movement from Franck's string quartet must, however, have conquered all, since a born composer for the organ was at work here. Stamm's presentation of an extended partita based on

Bach's "Sei gegrüßet, Jesu gütig" showed what an idiosyncratic interpreter he is, equipped with all the technical tricks of the trade. Deploying all means available to a "modern" organ, he endowed the piece with highly interesting and varied life, thereby probably coming closer to the composer's intentions than performances concerned with "stylistic purity".

Gunier Duvenbeck/General-Anzeiger

Serkin, Kempff, Arrau

Obituary for Three Great Masters

A generation of great masters of the piano has passed on. After Arthur Rubinstein (1887-1982), whom Thomas Mann called the "happy virtuoso", and the eccentrically unique Glenn Gould (19321982), after the Russian piano titan Emil Gilels (1916-1985) and the "virtuoso assoluto" Vladimir Horowitz (1903-1989), three outstanding exponents of the art of the piano, particularly linked with the German repertoire, have died in recent months: Rudolf Serkin, the American pianist born at Eger in 1903, who studied and made his debut at Vienna, and then created a name for himself in the Berlin of the twenties, became celebrated in Germany as the duo partner of violinist Adolf Busch, and emigrated to America in 1933.

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Wilhelm Kempff, an elegant manifestation among German pianists principally inclining towards profundity; and Claudio Arrau, the world-citizen born in Chile who from 1911 studied and lived in Berlin, only leaving Germany again in 1940, whose encyclopaedic musical thinking revolved around a centre marked out by Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and finally also Mozart.

They were all child (or at least student) prodigies. Rubinstein, born at Lodz around 1887, enjoyed even at the tenderest age the admiration of aunts and other relatives. "When the family decided that something must be made of my talent, I was three and a half years old" - he wrote in his autobiography. Contact was established in Berlin with Joseph Joachim, the world-famous violinist. The professor thoroughly tested the small boy's ear for music and his technical abilities, and promised that at the appropriate moment he would "supervise his artistic training". Horowitz, born near Kiev in 1903, was also a child prodigy of the sensational variety. He performed for Alexander Scriabin, who recognised the boy's immense capacity for supreme pianistic achievements, and lastingly influenced the young Horowitz's way of playing Gilels, a generation younger, gave public concerts from the age of thirteen, and was already teaching at the Moscow Conservatoire when he was twenty

Rudolf Serkin was twelve when he appeared for the first time before a larger audience at Vienna (while he was still studying composition with Joseph R. Marx and Arnold Schoenberg), and he started his solo career as a seventeen year-old. The Brahms sonatas that Rudolf Serkin recorded with Adolf Busch in Berlin at the start of the thirties as yet reveal hardly anything of the "fiery angel" he became in the course of his career as pianist. The rhythmic stamping of the pedal which intensified as a solo evening went by isn't yet to be heard there - and neither is his drone-like vocal accompaniment of the cantilenas, endowed with the greatest intensity through his expressive touch. In the business of interpretation of the "classical-romantic" piano repertoire, which tends towards levelling out, Serkin increasingly risked extremes without producing titanic distortions of the great Beethoven works or merely breaking the speed record in the final movements of the two Mendelssohn concertos.

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