WORDS MISUNDERSTOOD

The arts reflect the sensibilities of their age. Some works embrace the status quo in style and substance. Others are ahead of their time and must wait to find acceptance, or even acknowledgement that they exist. This program of music most listeners may never have heard is an opportunity to open ears and take in an array of sound worlds. ChamberFest Cleveland co-artistic director and pianist Roman Rabinovich calls it “a funky program, not without humor.”

The evening’s title, like so many others at this year’s festival, comes from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which the characters of the painter Sabina and her lover, the professor Franz, are constantly testing one another’s limits. “If I were to make a record of all Sabina and Franz’s conversations, I could compile a long lexicon of their misunderstandings,” Kundera writes. Franz goes further, questioning the ability of words to communicate and espousing the ineffable power of music. As Kundera writes of Franz, “what he yearned for at that moment, vaguely but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy allencompassing, overpowering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word!”

No words, but certainly hints of misunderstanding, greeted the September 1963 premiere in Hilversum, the Netherlands, of György Ligeti’s Poème symphonique, which is scored for the unusual instrumentation of 100 metronomes. The work couldn’t be more different from the composer’s Six Bagatelles performed earlier this season at ChamberFest. As a video of the premiere of Poème symphonique made for Dutch television reveals, the audience sat uneasily as 10 men and women dressed in concert attire wound up the metronomes, turned them on (at Ligeti’s signal), and left the platform. During the 10 minutes that followed, the metronomes ticked away at different tempos, the textures thinning and the rhythmic motion decreasing as machines gradually dropped out, leaving a single metronome to have its dying say (minus words). Some listeners snickered at the sound of so much audacious absurdity, but everyone sat politely afterwards as Ligeti explained his creation, in German. (The video was never broadcast and only rediscovered in recent years.)

Seven decades later, Poème symphonique remains an invigorating example of Ligeti’s relentless exploration of sonic possibilities. The piece also was the composer’s way of criticizing what was happening in the music world at the time. “What bothers me nowadays are above all ideologies (all ideologies, in that they are stubborn and intolerant towards others), and Poème symphonique is directed above all against them,” he wrote. “So I am in some measure proud that I could express criticism without any text, with music alone.”

Words also aren’t needed for the rest of this program. Caroline Shaw, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Music, a year earlier composed a work that paints images of diverse textures. In Limestone & Felt, a viola and a cello limn hard and soft surfaces. As the composer (born 1982) has written, “These are materials that can suggest place (a cathedral apse, or the inside of a wool hat), stature, function, and — for me — sound (reverberant or muted). In Limestone & Felt, the hocketing pizzicato and pealing motivic canons are part of a whimsical, mystical, generous world of sounds echoing and colliding in the imagined eaves of a gothic chapel. These are contrasted with the delicate, meticulous, and almost reverent placing of chords that, to our ears today, sound ancient and precious, like an antique jewel box. Ultimately, felt and limestone may represent two opposing ways we experience history and design our own present.”

Another gifted American composer, Gabriella Smith, mashes together a mad assortment of ideas in Carrot Revolution, which ChamberFest co-artistic director Diana Cohen likens to “rock music for string quartet.” Smith (born 1991) was inspired to create the piece in 2015 on a commission from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia for an exhibition titled “The Order of Things,” which also involved three visual artists. As she walked through the museum, the composer thought of a quote mistakenly attributed to Cézanne: “The day will come when a single, freshly observed carrot will start a revolution.” The result is a work in which all sorts of musical styles bump into one another, with the instruments immersed in a hyperactive flow of interplay with roots from ancient sources to newfangled ideas. “The piece is a patchwork of my wildly contrasting influences and full of weird, unexpected juxtapositions and intersecting planes of sound, inspired by the way Barnes’ ensembles show old works in new contexts and draw connections between things we don’t think of as being related,” Smith has written.

The final work on the program is the oldest, and the last, written by German composer Max Bruch (1838-1920). Begun as a string quintet in 1919, soon after the death of his wife and Germany’s defeat in World War I, the piece became a String Octet in B-flat major the following year, not long before Bruch’s death. The score existed only in the composer’s own handwritten manuscript until it was published in 1996.

Bruch dedicated the piece to a friend, the German-born violinist Willy Hess, whose artistry can be discerned in the extravagant writing for the first violin. Indeed, the String Octet sometimes sounds like a concerto for violin and strings as the “soloist” scales the heights in rapturous and acrobatic phrases redolent of what Bruch had woven into his two most beloved scores, the Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26 (1866), and Kol Nidrei, Op. 47 (1880), for cello and orchestra. The German Romanticism that pervades those early works is firmly in place in the String Octet many decades later, even as Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and others were heading in new directions.

The String Octet is warm and forceful, abounding in glowing thematic narratives and rich harmonic writing. The opening movement begins with an almost prayerful layering of string lines before the first violin takes the reins and drives the dramatic activity. Bruch’s mastery of counterpoint imparts notable inner interest to the intricate conversation, with motives echoed by the lower strings. The second-movement Adagio is a solemn song underpinned by dotted figures. A nostalgic middle section as lovely as anything Bruch wrote leads back to more troubled sentiments and then an aura of wistful resignation. The buoyant finale returns the first violin to the role of primary narrator. Bruch provides ample contrasts of key and texture, including short, soaring lines for lower instruments, and whips up a burst of animated energy to end his vibrant swan song.

© Donald Rosenberg