The New York Philharmonic Present "Duende: The Dark Notes"

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 18 November 2024 18:00

Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Brandon Patoc

At Lincoln Center’s wonderful David Geffen Hall, on the night of Saturday, November 2nd, I had the great pleasure to attend an excellent concert presented by the New York Philharmonic—it was superbly led by the extraordinary Susan Mälkki who until last year was the chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic.

The event began strikingly with a confident account of music that is not entirely within my competence to evaluate: Luca Francesconi’s mysterious, often compelling Duende: The Dark Notes for violin and orchestra—it is from 2013–with the superb Leila Josefowicz as soloist—it received its New York premiere with these performances. The composer has said revealingly: 

Music is magic. In every culture, it always has been used as a source of magic power. Music offers one of the simplest ways for everybody to access the transcendent.

He has also remarked, along similar lines:

I'm out to break up the ‘Lego blocks' that are the forms and preconceived expectations. I want to encourage audiences to stop thinking and go with their instincts.

Annotator Thomas May provides some useful background on the composer:

Two major figures of the postwar European avant-garde loomed particularly large as formative influences: Karlheinz Stockhausen and, in particular, fellow Italian Luciano Berio, with whom Francesconi worked as an assistant in the early 1980s. At the same time, he was drawn to playing in rock bands and discovered a special affinity for the jazz of Miles Davis; he later attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, which has long excelled in those fields. 

He adds interestingly, “He is strongly attracted to composing for the stage, having written a dozen operas and oratorios: Quartett, a setting of Heiner Müller's play based on the 18th-century epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses, has become one of the most frequently performed contemporary operas.” About the piece that the Philharmonic played, he reports as follows:

The title refers to a concept described in an influential essay by the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who associated duende with the heightened state of authenticity and expressive passion he found in the flamenco music and dance of his native Andalusia. 

The composer sees the violinist Leila Josefowicz as a kindred spirit who embodies the ethos of duende. They collaborated closely during the process of writing this concerto, which she premiered a decade ago, with Susanna Mälkki on the podium, to widespread acclaim (the 2015 BBC Proms performance received the BBC prize for Best Large-Scale work from the Royal Philharmonic Society); the score is dedicated jointly to the violinist and conductor. The violin itself — “this little piece of wood,” Francesconi says — is a “miracle” that has become “so charged with memory and history that it embodies all the good and worst things of our civilization.” 

Francesconi set out in Duende to “find a sort of new virginity in myself and in the instrument.” The piece is cast in five movements that are linked without pause.

The composer has written:

The Duende is historically the demon of flamenco. As Federico García Lorca explains, it is an underground force of unprecedented power that escapes rational control. To find a primal force in perhaps the most historically charged instrument in the West requires a perilous descent into the underworld of black notes, or a flight out of earth's orbit. Which is the same.

Below is what Lorca stated in his 1933 lecture, Theory and Play of the Duende:

All that has dark sounds has duende. There's no deeper truth than that. Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art. “Dark sounds,” said the man of the Spanish people, agreeing with Goethe, who in speaking of Paganini hit on a definition of the duende: “A mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained. ” 

So, then, the duende is a force not a labor, a struggle not a thought. I heard an old maestro of the guitar say: “The duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.” Meaning, it's not a question of skill, but of a style that's truly alive: meaning, it's in the veins: meaning, it's of the most ancient culture of immediate creation.

This “mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained” is, in sum, the spirit of the earth, the same duende that scorched Nietzsche's heart as he searched for its outer form on the Rialto Bridge and in Bizet's music, without finding it, and without seeing that the duende he pursued had leapt from the Greek mysteries to the dancers of Cádiz and the headless Dionysiac scream of Silverio's siguiriya.

… The duende I mean, secret and shuddering, is descended from that blithe daemon, all marble and salt, of Socrates, whom it scratched at indignantly on the day when he drank the hemlock, and that other melancholy demon of Descartes, diminutive as a green almond, that, tired of lines and circles, fled along the canals to listen to the singing of drunken sailors.

May records that:

At the center, in a movement dedicated to Nicolae Neacșu (a leading member of the Romanian-Romani band Taraf de Haïdouks), is a tribute to the Roma origins of flamenco, leading into a slow movement titled Ritual. A cadenza introduces the last movement, which culminates in a trancelike, otherworldly coda.

Francesconi joined the artists onstage to receive the audience’s acclaim.

Much more exciting, however, was the amazing second half of the evening, starting with a masterly reading of Richard Strauss’s magnificent Metamorphosen, A Study for 23 Solo Strings, from 1945, a tour de force and a paragon of late Romanticism—music that often has a neo-Wagnerian character but that also recalls the work of Gustav Mahler, particularly the Adagietto from his Symphony No. 5. The late Michael Sternberg, in a program note, comments on the destruction of Munich—the composer’s birthplace—during the Second World War:

The National Theater, called the Court Theater in the old days, was destroyed during the night of October 2–3, 1943. A few weeks later he penciled a 24-measure sketch that he labeled Trauer urn München (Mourning for Munich). A figure in quick notes in the middle of the texture would become a crucial component of Metamorphosen. On the morning of March 13, 1945, he learned that the Vienna Opera had burned down the night before; later that day he began to write Metamorphosen.

He goes on to identify a theme that appears late in the piece:

It is the funeral march from Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, Eroica, and Strauss writes “IN MEMORIAM!” at the moment of its appearance. It is as though this were the hidden theme of which all this music is the development, the metamorphosis. Strauss himself insisted that when he wrote his Mourning for Munich sketch and its variant in Metamorphosen, he was not aware of the Eroica connection. The idea, he said, just “escaped” from his pen, and it was only while composing Metamorphosen that what now seems so inevitable as well as so moving became clear to him.

Sternberg also adduced some further relevant connections:

On the morning of March 13, 1945, Richard Strauss learned that the Vienna Opera had burned down the night before, after an Allied bombing raid. For distraction from his misery, he had started to reread the complete works of Goethe. Almost certainly the title Metamorphosen came from Goethe, who used that word not only in his scientific writings, but also in reference to his own intellectual and spiritual development. Strauss copied two of Goethe's poems into his Metamorphosen sketchbook. The title of the first is Know Thyself, a task, Goethe suggests, as necessary as it is impossible. The second says that even in an incomprehensible world one must 

Behave with good sense 

As each day brings what it brings. 

Always remember: it's worked so far, 

And so it will surely work till the end.

The concert concluded stunningly with a brilliant rendition of Maurice Ravel’s La Valse, which exemplifies another strand of late Romanticism. In another edifying program note, James M. Keller offers a summary of the conditions for the work’s genesis:

In 1911 Ravel paid homage to the Viennese waltz in his Valses nobles et sentimentales, inspired most particularly by the waltzes of Schubert, and he clarified his interest in the extramusical connotations of the genre by inscribing this epigram at the top of the first page: “… le plaisir délicieux et toujours nouveau d'une occupation inutile” (“… the delicious and ever-fresh pleasure of a useless occupation”). 

As early as 1906 Ravel started thinking about creating a musical tribute to Johann Strauss II, but he didn't get much farther with the composition than deciding on its title: Wien (Vienna). Years passed, and Ravel was continually distracted by other projects. Then Europe crumbled under the calamity of World War I, during which Ravel served as a driver in the motor transport corps, having been turned down in several applications to enlist as an air-force pilot. 

When the war ended, Ravel retained his admiration for the waltz as a musical genre, but its sociological implications had changed considerably. What had formerly signified buoyant joie de vivre assumed an ominous tone in retrospect. The self-satisfied pleasure of 19th-century Vienna had led to national hubris and international catastrophe. By the time Ravel composed La Valse, in 1919–20, the gaiety of the Viennese ballroom could no longer be presented without knowing comment. Instead, Ravel's tone poem reveals itself, ever so gradually, to be a sort of danse macabre.

He adds:

“I conceived of this work as a sort of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz,” Ravel wrote, “mingled with, in my mind, the impression of a fantastic, fatal whirling.” He intended the piece for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and he accordingly prefaced his score with a vague scenario, signaling two spots specifically: 

Through breaks in the swirling clouds, waltzing couples may be glimpsed. Little by little they disperse: one makes out (A) an immense hall filled with a whirling crowd. The stage is illuminated gradually. The light of the chandeliers peaks at the fortissimo (B). An Imperial Court, about 1855. 

In the event, it would not be staged by Diaghilev. When Ravel and his pianist-colleague Marcelle Meyer played through the piece in a two-piano arrangement for the great ballet impresario, Diaghilev reportedly said, “Ravel, it's a masterpiece, but it's not a ballet. … It's the portrait of a ballet, a painting of a ballet.” 

The musicians were rewarded with an enthusiastic ovation.