VIENNA – Are the avant-garde and a broad audience mutually exclusive terms? Upon Arnold Schoenberg’s 150th birthday, in the city where premieres of his music set off public scandals, the annual festival Wien Modern set out to consider the relationship between experimental scores and community. The program took place at locations ranging from the Musikverein to the Schönberg Center from Oct. 30 to Nov. 30, with an emphasis on up-and-coming female composers such as Clara Iannotta but also the veteran Beat Furrer.
The opening concert in the Konzerthaus, performed by the Vienna Radio Symphony under Ingo Metzmacher and assistant conductor Irene Delgado-Jiménez, featured spatial compositions, removing seats from the parterre and interspersing the orchestra players. Nina Šenk’s Flux — a triple concerto for horn, trumpet, and accordion heard for the first time in a new, extended version — places the soloists (and part of the ensemble) onstage as they set off ricocheting, fast-paced but immaculately controlled textures.
The mood is constantly unstable, with inventive extended techniques that range from siren-like timbres to lively chatter. Toward the end, a trumpet blast sends the orchestra collectively scurrying before a mourning violin is echoed by the rest of the strings. In a darkly ironic moment, an audience member fainted as the ensemble settled down to glassy, then quietly squealing tones.
The approximately 20-minute score was adeptly juxtaposed with Iannis Xenakis’s Terretektorh (1965-6), which places 88 musicians on the concert house floor in concentric circles. The work is a masterclass in using texture as a building block, alternating passages of stasis with episodes ranging from pulsating ostinato to eerie glissandos. Percussion instruments such as maracas and wood blocks create transitions, leading to a sense of orderly chaos as the music swells and surges.
Segue to John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean, heard in its Austrian premiere. The 2013 work breaks the orchestra down into three groups, while a piano at the center of the room underpins the ensemble. The rise of homogenous strings together with marimba at the outset bathed the audience in waves of sound following the more eclectic pieces on the first half of the program. Tonality did not seem like a cliché but rather the purest means of communication as we collectively face the threat of climate change.
A concert by the Ensemble Kontrapunkte at the Musikverein probed concert hall conventions with works that exploit the theatrical possibilities of instrumental music. The event also celebrated the 50th anniversary of the local ensemble. Artistic director Gottfried Rabl moderated the evening with charm while proving a compelling actor in works that require the conductor to indulge in dramatic stunts.
In the requisite world premiere on the program, Sânziana Cristina Dobrovicescu‘s Quasiconcert for a narrating conductor and percussionist with the official title Es fängt fast an (It’s almost beginning), Rabl first appeared stuttering text. He eventually gained control over the ensemble as it entered a nightmarish landscape but at the climax was pushed off the podium by a musician who proceeded to tear up pages of the score.
Dobrovicescu, in an onstage interview, acknowledged the influence of Mauricio Kagel, and the kinship with the latter’s Finale with Chamber Ensemble — also on the program — was more than clear. Kagel’s characteristically surreal score includes satirical Baroque allusions, shifting harmonies, and march-like passages. The conductor proceeds to lose control and collapse to the ground, however. The musicians continued to play before dragging his lifeless corpse offstage.
Claude Vivier’s Bouchara (Chanson d’amour) provided a meditative contrast. The paean to an imaginary land includes a soprano (here, the steadfast Ekaterina Krasko), who phonates in unison with the ensemble throughout the score, with ostinatos and electronica that transport the listener but also unsettling microtonal dissonance. Clara Iannotta’s 2016 score Troglodyte Angels Clank By conjures an urban jungle of mechanical squawking and cawing by amplifying all instruments as they scrape, squeal, or pluck over nearly silent rustling percussion. In conversation with Rabl, Iannotta described it as a “very naked piece” that emerged in the aftermath of having panic attacks.
The evening ended with a minimalist work by Gavin Bryars, Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, which sets the loop of a homeless person singing from a gospel hymn. The purely tonal harmonies build gradually into a full chamber-orchestra textures, creating a cinematic quality that was heightened by performing the work in darkness. While perhaps too repetitive or sentimental for some ears (a few audience members departed before the concert’s end), the interaction of the recorded singer’s speech rhythm with the instrumental writing proved moving and a testimony to the endurance of the principles championed by (still contemporary) Steve Reich.
Back at the Konzerthaus, Beat Furrer’s music theater work Begehren (Desire) received a consummate performance by the Klangforum Wien under the baton of the composer himself (he is also the ensemble’s founder). The work freely adapts texts by Cesare Pavese, Günter Eich, Hermann Broch, and Ovid into an exploration of the Orpheus myth. While the male figure (“Er” or he) recites in German, the female protagonist (“Sie” or she) responds in Latin until the seventh scene, creating a celestial plane on which it is impossible for them to consummate their love.
Furrer’s 2001 score creates intricate webs of sound, at once delicate and frenzied at the outset, only to recede into a nocturnal whispering in the second scene. The ensemble merely makes the air vibrate as an underscoring to the text for “Er” in the fifth scene while creating a backdrop menacing and celestial for the incantation of the chorus (Cantando Admont) about branches that are ripped from a tree in the eighth. The work is intellectually stimulating and immediate.
A public reception followed in the foyer to celebrate Furrer’s upcoming 70th birthday and draw attention to a “media box” including text, video, and audio recordings. It is a fitting-enough tribute to one of Europe’s most important figures in contemporary music, but — as Schoenberg knew very well — art that is too challenging is not destined to reach the masses. The connection to the composer, however, emerged as little more than a premise for Wien Modern given that there was no emphasis on his actual compositions (I did not have a chance to attend the symposium “Digging Schönberg” or experience new scores by Manos Tsangaris entitled Arnold Elevators). The robust festival rather served to facilitate premieres and introduce listeners to a range of composers, some of whom will go down in history, some of whom will not.
