Lucerne Festival: This is what diversity should sound like

The origin of the world is a gray nothing. Six copies of it flicker across the stage-wide screen in the Lucerne Hall of the KKL. Nothing becomes a surging mass – perhaps the famous primordial soup from which all life originated. Suddenly there are geometric forms, they overlay and structure the undulation, they proliferate and multiply, becoming self-similar structures, intertwining to form intuitions of plants, trees, and forests. And then it gets light, the first day begins with a flash, and the solo piano begins.

This is how the beginning of all life sounds – and the beginning of the fascinating piano concerto “In Seven Days” by Thomas Adès, who, in cooperation with the Israeli video artist Tal Rosner, transformed the biblical story of creation into a multimedia work of art. The piece created in 2008 by this year’s composer-in-residence in Lucerne was performed for the first time in a late concert on Saturday with a new, digitally refined image track from Rosner’s Genesis Imagination and delighted the packed hall. But wait: a storm of jubilation for a contemporary composer, and also from a remarkably young audience at the best party time? Even here in Lucerne, where new music has been cultivated for decades, it doesn’t happen every day.

Subversive

The concert was without question a fortunate choice for the first performance of the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra this summer. Adès combines a suggestively gripping narrative with Anglo-Saxon serenity in dealing with tradition. This music is up to date, also in the unusual liaison with the film, but does not want to shine so much through complexity or avant-gardism, but rather to speak to the listener. The pianist Kirill Gerstein and the young Swiss conductor Elena Schwarz succeed in doing this so convincingly in the perfectly synchronized performance that one has a heretical thought: Why do you hide such a gem in a studio concert at a late hour? This work could well have been played at the opening of the festival.

It would not have frightened anyone there and, on top of that, would have corresponded to this year’s “Diversity” motto in a far more original way than Rachmaninoff’s second symphony, which was magnificently played but programmatically arbitrary. “In Seven Days” points out that diversity does not necessarily have to be understood as a cultural-political concern and that it does not have to be narrowed down to the role of underrepresented groups in the classical music scene. Diversity and polyphony can instead be thought of from the point of view of the music itself and filled with life artistically. Such a freer, thoroughly subversive approach to the motto characterized the likewise highly acclaimed festival performances by Igor Levit and Cecilia Bartoli.

night and day

In Levit’s piano recital there is a little thorn in the programme, it only becomes apparent when you listen to it. Levit smuggled a piece by his artist friend Fred Hersch into the program, which he premiered in New York in early 2022. He values ​​the American jazz musician as “one of the best pianists of our time”, praise from a qualified source, after all Levit himself is one of the best in the classical field. Hersch’s “Variations on a Folk Song” in turn connect both worlds, they are a consistently tonal, amazingly sensual meditation on the trapper song “Oh Shenandoah” from Missouri, which was sung by Harry Belafonte, Judy Garland and Bob Dylan, among others. However, anyone who expected a light-footed jazz interlude in the otherwise extremely demanding program environment of works by Brahms, Wagner and Liszt was profoundly mistaken.

Hersch’s music borrows from jazz only the speaking intonation, a few harmonies and the sometimes rambling melodies that let the experienced improviser shine through. These tones are not born out of the moment, rather they want to continue the classic-romantic art of variation into the present. At the premiere in Carnegie Hall, the piece was performed as an answer to Beethoven’s E major Sonata op. 109 with its sky-storming finale of variations. In Lucerne, the bright music, which undermines any stylistic classification, responds to the internalized last organ works by Brahms in the adaptation by Ferruccio Busoni. Shadow of death and optimism, night and day so close together – what a contrast!

This could only be followed by a single work that has this night-day contrast all-encompassing as its theme: Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde”. Levit, who apparently has little interest in standard repertoire, performs the famous prelude in the piano version by Zoltán Kocsis and lets its final notes flow seamlessly into the identical beginning of Liszt’s B minor sonata. That’s daring, but consistent. Because this keyboard poem, presumably inspired by «Faust» – this is shown in the merging as clearly as rarely – anticipates Wagner’s existential struggle for final questions. Levit approaches the pianistically demanding opus just as pointedly, passionately to the point of excess, but still with a decisive remnant of control. The audience rightly rips it off their seats after this masterpiece.

hunger for culture

With ovations, one is currently very generous in Lucerne. In addition to the relief that music and festival operations have now resumed in full, there may also be a hunger for culture that has not been sufficiently quenched during the past two Corona years. Nevertheless, it is noticeable that even with performances like that of Igor Levit, a few places in the KKL remain free – more than usual at the Lucerne Festival, which is accustomed to success. Are these just the reservations to be expected because of the still not contained pandemic? Or does the motto “diversity”, which is uncomfortable for many or difficult to understand, evoke more resistance than the matter actually deserves?

In any case, that would be unfortunate, because Cecilia Bartoli’s performance – also not sold out – showed how playfully a performance can do justice to a motto and even enrich it with new aspects without having to constantly complain about a theoretical superstructure. Bartoli appeared in a semi-staged performance of Mozart’s opera “La clemenza di Tito” and brought her original sound ensemble Les Musiciens du Prince-Monaco under Gianluca Capuano. In this peculiarly belated opera seria, which was inserted into the work on The Magic Flute, there are two breeches roles, ie male figures, which are now generally played by women.

However, the role of the unhappily in love Caesar’s murderer Sesto was originally written for a soprano castrato. Bartoli has been studying the music of the «evirati» for many years, and here too, with this late classical latecomer from 1791, she is completely in her element. In a trouser suit and with a voice as splendid as she has not been for years, she enjoys playing with the dazzling gender identity of her role, and Lea Desandre, who has just been celebrated for her Cherubino in Zurich’s “Figaro”, drives the irritation in the role of Annio with her brightly timbred mezzo-soprano still on top. What is now part of the heated debates about “diversity” as “gender fluidity” has been known in opera for four hundred years. And it doesn’t upset anyone.