Lincoln Center Festival: The Complete Works of Edgard Varese, Part I

On July 19 and 20, the Lincoln Center Festival is presenting a retrospective of the complete works of Edgard Varese (1883-1965), a French-born composer who spent portions of his youth in Italy and Berlin and ultimately made most of his career after French World War I service in the United States, arriving in 1915.  Varese was the ultimate avant-gardist in his time, but his music has largely fallen from view apart from recordings.  In decades of NYC concert-going, I can recall few experiences of hearing live performances, and both of those involved large orchestral works played by the NY Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra (Arcana and Ameriques).  I began exploring his music as a student with LP recordings conducted by Arthur Weisberg and Friedrich Cerha on Nonesuch and Vox respectively, the former now out-of-print, the later available on an ArkivMusic reissue.  There have been notable recordings since then by Pierre Boulez and Kent Nagano, and a "complete Varese" set conducted by Ricardo Chailly during his time as music director of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra for Decca.

But getting to hear this music performed live by top NYC musicians is a rare opportunity, and Alice Tully Hall was packed last night for Part I, which focused on the works not requiring a full symphony orchestra.  They ranged from the solo unaccompanied flute of the brilliant Claire Chase in "Density 21.5"  to the relatively large ensembles required for such works as "Ecuatorial" and "Deserts."  The musicians were among New York's leading groups for contemporary music, the International Contemporary Ensemble and So Percussion.  Kent Tritle brought his Musica Sacra chorus for "Etude pour Espace" and played the prominent organ part in "Ecuatorial."  The directorial genius in charge of the ensemble pieces was conductor and percussion specialist Steven Schick, who teaches at University of California, San Diego, and the Manhattan School of Music. 

The performances throughout the evening were superb.  They began with a tape, the famous "Poeme Electronique" that Varese devised for a pavilion at the Brussels world fair in 1958.  This was played in surround sound in the dark hall, with odd noises coming from all directions, and made a fascinating introduction for the audience into the peculiar sound world of the composer.  Then Anu Komsi, soprano, and pianist Mika Rannali presented a real curiosity, a song, "Un Grand Sommeil Noir," written by the young composer (then 23) before he ventured into the avant-garde, so here was some proof that Varese was reasonably well-schooled and could compose in a traditional genre. 

The jump to "Offrandes", a work for soprano and chamber ensemble that exhibits the heavy influence of Igor Stravinsky (written 1921), is startling.  I thought that "Offrandes" might be a bit of a spoof piece, at least in its second section, whose text by Jose Joan Tablada struck me as a series of nonsense statements for which the music was appropriately humorous.  The first movement, setting text by Vincente Huidoboro of a more coherent nature, seemed the most heavily influenced by Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, especially in the solo woodwind writing and the rocking chords in the strings. 

Other ensemble works featured in the first half were Hyperprism, Integrales, and Ecuatorial, all dating from the interwar period.  Ecuatorial is a big piece for baritone, cello theremins (electronic tone generators in roughly the cello range), organ and brass and percussion ensemble, the percussion including many unusual sounding instruments, setting a Spanish translation of an ancient Mayan ritual text.  Varese achieves an extraordinary feeling of antiquity in this piece.  Hyperprisma and Integrales are purely instrumental pieces, calling forth feats of extreme virtuosity from the musicians, but seeming much more listener-friendly today than they must have felt three-quarters of a century ago.

After intermission, we had the somewhat less successful (in my opinion) post-World War II works.  Apart from Density 21.5, which is of course a classic piece in the mold of Debussy's Syrinx, the big pieces here did not come off as convincingly for me.  Varese seemed here to drift into a preoccupation with sound for sound's sake without much thought to making what might be called a musical argument, statement or development of themes, or even thematic variation. Instead, he seemed focused on blocks of sound and the dramatic juxtaposition of sounds and silence, some of which I found interesting and some just plain boring. 

The second half began with a very short "Dance for Burgess" presented in a version edited by Korean composer Chou Wen-Chung, who was also responsible for the arrangement of the varied materials associated with "Etude pour Espace", which was experimental music that could not originally be performed according to the composer's intention due to the limited resources made available by the piece's patron.  Dr. Chou rearranged the surviving materials to reflect Varese's original intentions. (He was present for last night's concert and took a bow from the audience after the performance of this piece.)  Sound panels descended from the side of the hall for spacial dispersal of the sound, but I didn't find the effect  very convincing.  The chorus sang from a variety of texts while Ms. Komsi sustained high-flying lines and odd intervals.  In Deserts, the final piece, I rapidly began to lose interest due to the lack of much to hold on to in the way of themes or development.  This was the kind of piece where I suppose one must just let go of any preconceptions about what music should be, and just be swept away by the sound.

The great thing about this concert was being able to hear Varese's sounds live.  No recording, and no consumer audio equipment, can convincingly present the effect of a Varese ensemble in full cry.  These are pieces that have to be heard live, and there is no denying the theatrical element of seeing them being performed - especially the percussion parts. 

Even when I was not fully taken by a particular piece or part of a piece, I was delighted to have the experience of hearing it, and have to commend, in particular, Steven Schick, who clearly played the major role in assembling these performances and seeing them performed to a high standard.  At the same time, I have the feeling that even more fluid and coherent performances of this music could be achieved if it were to receive more frequent performances.  I have observed this phenomenon over time with the music of Schoenberg and Carter.  As musical complexity develops over time and what was formerly deemed very complex becomes less so for newer generations of musicians, the expressive qualities of music emerge more clearly in performances.  One can listen to "historic" recordings by those composers and then hear modern renditions and come to agree with Schoenberg, who remarked that his music would become more popular once it got beyond the stage of performances that were focused mainly on getting the notes right.  I've no doubt that the performances I heard last night were much more captivating than those decades-old recordings in my collection for precisely that reason; the language of the music is more familiar to today's young musicians, who are better able to handle the technical challenges and find the music hidden in the notes.  Good as these performances were, I bet that a similar festival in ten or twenty years time would prove even more enjoyable for that very reason.

In the audience, I had the feeling of people being witnesses to a historic event.  Perhaps among those of us who are the nerds and geeks of the New York concert audience, this will be the kind of event where we will tell people years later that "we were there" when the works of Edgard Varese were performed in a two-night festival at Lincoln Center way back in 2010.  Will this little festival spark enough interest in Varese to get more performances during the regular concert season in the major halls?  Only time will tell. Tonight's NY Philharmonic performance may turn out to be the more influential for this purpose, especially if Alan Gilbert decides that he should include a major Varese work in the subscription programs each season.  After all, the orchestra, having rehearsed for this concert, now has a capital investment in some rather difficult music, and it would be a shame not to harvest some return from the investment by treating tonight's concert as a "one-off."

There may be a few tickets left, since the NYP sent out an email blast to subscribers yesterday publicizing the availability of seats.  (From my experience of buying my ticket on line several weeks ago, I suspect the selection of remaining seats is very limited...)