A Concert of Wunderwerke

Dr. Christian Meyer, Director of the Arnold Schönberg Center, with his wife, Dr. Susana Zapke, at the post-concert reception.

Tonight the second of two stellar concerts took place in the concert hall of the Arnold Schönberg Center, presented by the Ensemble Wiener Collage. Spanning eight centuries, from Guillaume de Machaut to Sidney Corbett (whose arresting Knochentänze, for viola and accordion, was premiered this evening), nearly half of the pieces were written by composers in their 40's. As befitting the venue, the program began with three of Schönberg’s Five Piano Pieces, and closed with Webern’s Quartet for violin, clarinet, tenor saxophone and piano. Taking a clue from the unusual and compelling instrumentation employed by Webern (whose Quartet was praised by Alban Berg, at the 1931 premiere, as a ‘Wunderwerk,’ and the one composition in the world that was 100% original), the remaining works on the program were largely written for atypical instrumental combinations: Isable Mundry’s Spiegel Bilder for clarinet and accordion; Alexander Stankovski’s Linien for alto flute and trombone; Simeon Pironkoff’s Zyklus Sujets – Epilogue, for clarinet, trombone, cello and piano; Machaut’s Biauté paree de valour, arranged for accordion by Alfred Melichar; Sofia Gubaidulina’s Et Expecto for accordion; and René Starr’s Gemini A1 for violin and flute, and Gemini A7 for violin and saxophone. These latter two works were brief, intense, and rhythmically complex, yet the accelerating ‘spiral structure,’ with the instruments seeming to engage in a drag race, remained transparent. Alfred Melichar, a well-known interpreter of contemporary music written for the accordion, captured the harsh, thick sonorities of Gubaidulina’s solo work with passion and attention to the extreme dynamic contrasts, reflective of her tendency to oppose light and dark. Finally, the fractured components of Pironkoff’s Epilogue from the Zyklus Sujets were infused with a dry humor---one could almost hear the ghost of Erik Satie. Four strands of material unfolded simultaneously---faux Bach, played on a cello tuned in microtones against the piano; muted glissandos sweeping around on the trombone; chords repeated twice on the piano in a wide array of tempi and dymanics and register (these are what brought Satie to mind); and the clarinet, in his own world. I wanted to hear more, and in fact there are three earlier sections, written for trio, of this complex work. This evening's concert was the final event of two days devoted to the topic of music and number, with symposia, lectures, and panel discussions.