There was a sense of excitement at the Lucerne Festival as this year’s composer-in-residence took the stage. Known for his eclectic and wide-ranging work, his energetic presence and his flame-coloured hair, Enno Poppe took on the dual role of Komponist and conductor for his first appearance at the KKL this year, stepping up to present two of his instrumental works, Blumen (2023) and Prozession (2015/2020) with the Ensemble Intercontemporain.
In German – the composer's native tongue – Blumen are flowers: delicate, colourful, complex organisms, the sum of many minute parts. Commissioned by the Lucerne Festival, the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the Casa da Música in Porto, made up of a series of fifteen delicate, multi-faceted miniatures, Blumen is bright and surprising, showcasing Poppe’s sharp eye for detail as well as his impish sense of humour.
Playful, complex, surprisingly tender, the piece plays with glissandi and pizzicati, scattered silences, dance-like rhythms: one step forward and two steps back. Solo lines shine briefly, patterns are tossed back and forth across the stage in bright, mobile conversation, then slip back under the surface. Clusters of sound emerge, as if ur-instruments were briefly created out of the meeting of close textures and tones: the piano, the harp, the celesta. Then, sudden silence. My notes contain the words wavelets, gestures, phrasework. Always, a sense of something slippery, chromatic, vanishing just out of reach.
Prozession is presented as being in sharp contrast to the first work – as the stage is being set up between pieces, Poppe speaks briefly about wanting the works showcased this summer to be as different as possible – but though one is a series of short tableaux and one a sweeping behemoth, and though the latter expands the soundscape beyond the acoustic, there is a common musical language at work here, a play on micro- and macroscopic arcs unfolding simultaneously.
Written in lockdown, there is a sense of fractured ritual in Prozession, a sense of gradual, expansive movement into the unknown. Within the structure created by the percussionists at the four corners of the stage, every instrument is illuminated for a moment, bestowing upon us a theme, which then unfolds and expands, taking up space – shifting, microtonal – and then retreats back into quiet. (An arc. Almost zero. Then: a new voice.)
Poppe has described the work’s structure as fractal, and there is something almost jazz-inflected in this highly ordered chaos, like a series of symphonic movements put through a cocktail shaker, or a reversed cinematic score. Prozession plays on our sense of anticipation, on our ability to concentrate, on a sense of contradiction, on a kind of maddening simultaneity of stillness and flow.
Growling and shimmering, the two 1970s Korg synthesisers bring a richness to the soundscape that flickers in and out of reach, echoing and complicating the instrumental textures. The electric guitar was harder to distinguish. In fact, the amplified elements could perhaps have been a little more distinct throughout. The Ensemble Intercontemporain’s performance as a whole felt perhaps a little restrained: admirably precise, beautifully textured, but it would have been nice to see them let their hair down just a little a bit more, especially when the piece reaches its wild central apex. But perhaps not giving us exactly what we want is key to Enno Poppe’s vision.
Both pieces play with a sense of the interrupted gesture, the unfinished, a movement towards something always more important than an end point itself. When he turns back to take a bow, Poppe gives a mischievous grin.
