Tucked away in an unassuming street within hailing-distance of Waterloo Station is the 1901 Arts Club, an intimate and elegant venue dedicated to the pursuit of rare and curious pleasures. That at least is the impression from my first visit, in the estimable company of Morton Feldman and Karlheinz Stockhausen, two composers with whom it is always interesting to spend time musing on their conception of time and space, sound and colour, movement and stasis. On such occasions it is essential to have on hand artists who can light up the conversation with insightful, incisive performances; in this instance that was provided by Jonathan Powell (piano), Sophie Dunér (voice) and Leora Cohen (violin).
For Feldman, the centenary of whose birth is being marked this year, time within musical space is primordial, unconcerned with wars, revolutions or the fluctuating price of cheese. Some of his pieces take forever to perform; others will seduce you without a moment’s notice – which is how this soirée began, with Dunér’s dreamy intonation of Only, a solo strophic setting of one of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. Her voicing resembled that of a cor anglais shorn of its nasal quality but still sounding sonorous. In the wonderland world of Stockhausen time is governed by the rules of Lewis Carroll where anything can, and does, happen – also without notice. A case in point is Klavierstück V, which is one of the markers of his retreat from the idealist aesthetics of total serialism, in favour of an exercise in heightened expressiveness driven by fluctuating tempi and, horror of horrors, recognisable repetition. Powell’s reading was full of excitement and playfulness; his articulation of the decorative patina of melismas with which the piece is encrusted brought to mind the refinement of Baroque ornamentation.
The centre-piece of the evening was a terrific performance of Tierkreis, Stockhausen’s extraordinary rendering of the signs of the Zodiac into musical emblems, written originally for six percussionists and musical boxes. Dunér and Powell’s exposition was an edge-of-the-seat experience, the singer’s obvious facility with the weird contents of the piece fully on show. She had learnt it with the composer and so has lived a long with time with its Babel-inspired collection of polyglot vocalises. There are other versions of the piece floating in cyberspace but Dunér and Powell make a creditable case for theirs to be canonical.
Powell then performed two pieces which graphically illustrated the composers’ galaxy-wide concept of time in musical space. Feldman’s Palais di Mari, a plaintive evocation of the ruins a Babylonian royal palace, gently swayed and shimmered within its tightly-structured repetitions of pitch, rhythm and tempo. In stark contrast, Klavierstück IX exploded into the room with its notorious gesture of a single chord repeated 226 times. It is a pulsating gesture which, to be mischievous for a moment, might be thought of as an obscenity directed at the rigours of serialist orthodoxy. Powell played it at a fair lick so that the kaleidoscope of colours arising from the variations in attack lit up the room in the most glorious fashion. For the rest of the piece the sparks kept flickering, sometimes with menaces, but were never allowed to consume the gripping performance. It ended in much the same way as Ezra Pond left his first Canto, the two notes mouthing “so that”.
So that time passed. And then there was the coda, with Cohen joining Powell and Dunér to sing Voice, a delightfully gentle Webernesque poem that I’m sure Morty would have enjoyed.
