Les Siècles made their Lucerne Festival debut Thursday evening under the baton of their founder François-Xavier Roth, with a programme of two pieces by Lucerne’s 2023 composer-in-residence Enno Poppe, alongside Ligeti’s Violin Concerto. The whole was full of striking moments – beautiful ones, even – but failed to quite come together.
Poppe is drawn to contrast, and this programme showcased two very different sides to his work. Öl, a breathless piece structured in long melodic lines, plunges into the full spectrum of sound, from the broken bells and whistles of the opening to the deepest darkest chords in the strings, a texture shimmering with quarter-tones. It is a playful, cinematic creation, with ghosts of melodies arcing in and out, disintegrating at the edges, and duets of instruments melting into each other. Under Roth’s stern and precise direction, Les Siècles brought the complex instrumental textures into detailed relief.
It’s easy to get lost in a structure like this, built on the constant subversion of expectations, but there is always an arc to guide you, an overall coherence, a sense of movement and flow. With Augen, we move onto something completely different: a cycle of 25 miniature songs. This gels a little less immediately. At times, it was hard to grasp the intended tone of the cycle, with its dark and odd text, its playfulness that runs the risk of feeling throwaway. A few of the songs felt almost satirical in the extent to which they deconstruct the form, others like sketches tossed off with infinite virtuosity and style, but somehow a sense of disconnection prevails.
This is partly down to Poppe’s unusual treatment of the text. He seems to use Else Lasker-Schüler’s poems as a disjointed mass of material, broken down into nodules of sound, which makes for wonderfully chewy verbal textures for the soprano, but creates something rather hard to parse from the auditorium side.
Corralled by this scrappy structure, Sarah Maria Sun felt like she didn’t get to live up to her full potential as a performer here, though she did some magnificent throaty trembling, and produced some piercingly perfect miniature high notes. Her delivery was precise, her virtuosity undeniable, but at times the text, and indeed the soprano’s line, was almost completely lost in the ensemble texture. A listener without the programme in hand would, I suspect, have taken away very little of the gut-wrenching poetry, or the irony.
Nevertheless, there is a certain melancholy charm to these morsels of song, and the ensemble brought the Webern-inflected instrumentation (mandolin, guitar) to sparkling life. But it was with the Ligeti that Les Siècles really locked into place onstage, playing as one with sensitivity and verve, the solo lines shining out cleanly, the second movement chorus of recorders, slide whistles and ocarinas a strange and shimmering wonder. Here, everyone felt on much firmer ground than in the first part of the evening; it was a vivid, fully inhabited performance, with Isabelle Faust at the heart of it. Faust, as soloist, both rests on the ensemble and galvanises it, a symbiosis that was a real pleasure to watch, the violin’s voice soaring above Les Siècles like a golden thread, unbreakable.
Here too are arabesques, a sense of contained fire, something embroidered on thin air. Here, too, there is silence, but we are not lost: we are coming home.
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