In the Labyrinth

In the Labyrinth

Ensemble Works by Beethoven, Shostakovich, Carter, and Francesconi

Paul Griffiths

Introducing Daedalus

The many inventions of the legendary artificer Daedalus included not only the Cretan labyrinth but also the way to get out of it: Ariadne’s thread. This concert offers us something of a labyrinth —works from three centuries, played out of chronological order— together with a thread, in the sound of the flute.

Before that instrument enters, however, we have a little labyrinth of strings set in play by Dmitri Shostakovich in his Two Pieces for String Octet Op. 11 of 1924–5. The first of these two movements, which together play for about ten minutes, came about in December 1924, when the composer had recently started work on his First Symphony. He also began a fugue for the same small group of strings, having in mind a suite. A scherzo followed in July 1925, right after the symphony was finished, and thereupon the composer decided to stay just with the two movements he had completed. What he thereby produced was something of a before-and-after diptych. The Prelude, an adagio in D minor, begins with gestures of power and collapse, giving way to a quick dance. Features from the opening part steal back, including the final touch of melody in a haze of triplet oscillations. This is a striking piece, leaving aside that it was written by an 18-year-old, but Shostakovich’s individual mark is hardly to be heard—which cannot at all be said of the wild G-minor scherzo. Shostakovich dedicated the opus to the memory of a poet friend carried off by illness, Vladimir Kurchavov.

The dedication Luca Francesconi chose, for his piece named after the labyrinth-maker, was to the memory of Pierre Boulez, partly because the work was commissioned for this hall and first performed here just under two years ago, but also for the reason that Francesconi wanted to contemplate the recently departed composer, himself a master of the labyrinth. As he has explained it, the trauma of World War II forced Boulez, and other composers of that generation, to develop abstract systems with which to create music that would stand in stout refusal of the past. The problem then was to find some way to escape the labyrinth, to exert freedom and independence.

For his own labyrinth, Francesconi had two models in mind: the hedge maze at Hampton Court, southwest of London, where, among many blind trails, one route leads to the center, and the mesmerizing pathways of Boulez’s Dérive 2, a 48-minute stretch of music created from a single chord. The ensemble of Daedalus is that of Boulez’s earlier and much shorter Dérive 1, which departs from the same originating chord; this ensemble is the standard line-up of the Pierrot lunaire quintet (flute and clarinet, violin and cello, piano) plus percussion. Francesconi, however, gives a separate role to the flute, which he calls in his score the “spiritual leader,” a voice bringing exactly those qualities of freedom and independence to those—the others—who speak for the labyrinth and from within it. Of course, in order to engage in its task, the flute has to enter the labyrinth. For the first two and a half minutes it is outside, expressing its agility and its evocative power in a solo that is not devoid of harmonic implications, with B flat a point of reference at the outset. The labyrinth comes to life quite suddenly and the flute goes in, but without losing its character, based on virtuosity and song. Indeed, these traits are little by little taken up by the other five, though soon they are insisting on their mechanical nature. So the dialogue proceeds, between what is high, rhythmically free, and potentially songful, and on the other hand what is low, strictly pulsed, and machine-like.

Increasingly the flute is absorbed. It breaks out in a short cadenza, but soon is back, embedded more fiercely and firmly. A quick switch to piccolo sends the rest of the ensemble wild, towards a magical passage where vibraphone and piano find themselves imitating the piccolo, the clarinetist on an E-flat instrument plays airy sounds, and the strings whirl in harmonics, sometimes microtonally tuned. This is roughly the halfway mark in the half-hour composition, which continues with the soloist returning to standard flute for a phase of intensification, falling to a first arrival around the midpoint of the maze, represented by a low E flat on the cello. Flute, vibraphone, and piano are captivated, violin and clarinet dumbfounded. But soon a new game gets going around rapid reiterations from the vibraphone, followed by another, in unison phrases. The flute then interprets E flat—its own, middle-register E flat—as the starting point for a song, which provokes increasingly vociferous resistance until, as the score has it, “the system starts to glitch and jam,” without the flute. The flute rejoins, but then the system is “losing direction” —or finding that its only direction is given by the gravitational draw of that midpoint. The percussionist finds a new instrument: a metal washtub scraped with a metal barbecue-cleaning brush, and these domestic utensils mark time as everything descends into stasis on middle D sharp and E.

Escaping the Labyrinth

The flute is restored to an even partnership, with piano and bassoon, in the trio Beethoven wrote at the age of 15, one of several chamber pieces with piano dating from his early teenage years and presumably intended for himself to play and enjoy with other musicians in Bonn. For the moment, he was not in a hurry. This trio, in G major, will play for close on half an hour if the long exposition of its first movement is repeated.

Beethoven begins his exposition with an immediate contrast of assertion with grace. He continues a good while amiably, and then, when the music has duly moved into the dominant key, D major, peps up his invention with syncopations in which the instruments join together. The bassoon has a nice moment in D minor, set off by the general buoyancy. A downward move in severe octaves arrives back in D minor for the start of the development, which is quite soon leading to a full recapitulation.

The slow movement is in G minor and in the rhythm of a funeral march, albeit beautifully ornamented. Both wind instruments have their opportunities. The opening, for instance, is for bassoon and piano only, enhancing the dark, while the flute directs the lead back to a final memento of the beginning. Closure is delayed and delayed until completed with a dominant chord to summon the finale. This takes the form of a set of variations on a good-humored tune. In the first variation the piano shows off its high-stepping 16th notes; then the bassoon parades in triplets. The bassoon is forward again in the minor-key fourth variation, where the flute is silent—but has its turn in the sixth variation, followed by a grand march as seventh and an up-tempo reprise of the theme, with a coda.

One might imagine the 15-year-old Beethoven peering ahead into the labyrinth of his life and wondering what might become of him, what he might become. With Elliott Carter, at the age of almost a hundred, any such contemplation would have had to go the other way, except that with him retrospection always seems to have been overtaken by a zestful immersion in whatever new project.

Concertos, offering lively interplay between soloist and ensemble across a range of moods, had come regularly in his output since the one he wrote for Heinz Holliger in 1987, but requests from flautists kept being put off, because he felt “the flute could not produce the sharp attacks that I use so frequently.” He changed his mind in response to a request from Elena Bashkirova and the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival for a piece to celebrate his 100th year, and found the task absorbing: “From mid-September 2007 to March 2008 ideas and notes for it fascinated me without relief.”

Like several of its predecessors, Carter’s Flute Concerto plays continuously through several short sections of varied character, though the preponderance of slow and songful music for the soloist gives this piece a quite particular feel, countering any notion of the flute as an expressively cool instrument. Shades of lament may be found here, and places where emphasis on a small group of notes, or the echoing of just one, might suggest an exotic kind of melody. (Hearing the dhrupad singing of the Dagar Brothers in Berlin, in 1964, was an experience that stayed with the composer.) Another striking aspect of the score is the knitting together of the flute and the accompanying chamber orchestra by means of single notes quickly taken over by the one from the other.

Within seconds the piece is into typically Carterian territory of controlled freedom. There is a honk from the orchestra without strings, and then the soloist lets fly a flurry in which, though all 12 notes are represented, prominent thirds and fifths contribute an elegance founded in musical history and acoustic reality. Holding the notes of this slip of tune to make a chord, the strings project it as luminous beauty.

The allegretto that develops from this has the flute zipping capriciously between moments of hesitation while also discovering the support it will have throughout the piece from harp, piano, and percussion. It comes to settle on a repeated E flat, arguably the keynote from the start, from which it moves into more declamatory music at a somewhat calmer tempo, against vociferous interjections. Out of this comes a magical course of even notes involving the soloist with the orchestral flute player, so that there seems to be no pause for breath. Next comes a presto of vivid orchestral interjections, around a flute meditating at a much slower tempo, usually against drones far below. This music prepares for the ensuing section marked “mesto” (sadly), a long flute melody sparsely accompanied. Towards its end the melody gives the impression of two voices in dialogue, one low, the other ever higher. The following allegro non troppo again has two speeds at once, but now with the flute agile while the orchestral players (strings mostly) hold long chords. Eventually the orchestra becomes more active, preparing for the final leggierissimo (very lightly), where the soloist’s closing sprint is greeted by bell sounds and a close.