Bread and Music

The Museum of Modern Art, located in the Museum Quarter, held beautiful surprises for Yvonne and I yesterday. She was especially attracted to Daniel Spoerri’s “Hahns Abendmahl" ("Hahn’s Supper"), a ‘trap picture.' A dinner party for 16 people was frozen in time, with remains of cigarettes, coffee residue, stained wine glasses and plates all attached to a black board with artificial resin glue, and hung on the wall...documentation of an event that occurred on May 23, 1964. The photograph in this post, another of the artist’s ‘trap pictures’, was dated three years earlier...a series of petrified hunks of ‘Brot.’ The highlight for me in our tour of the museum was an extensive collection of Fluxus pieces and ephemera. The infamous Symphony No. 461 – A Pastoral Symphony, by Dick Higgins, created by shooting blank score manuscript pages with an air gun - was one of his three symphonies in the exhibit.

The museum was so entrancing, with its current exhibition comparing art and mathematics, that we stayed until closing. I raced to the Konzerthaus, with the intention of attending the concert in the Mozart Hall performed by Klangforum Wien. But my system...to purchase a ticket from one of several people trying to sell their unused tickets near the front entrance...led to an accidental purchase of the concert ticket for the Great Hall, realized as I was heading back into the building. No matter...I heard an utterly intoxicating performance of the Shostakovitch Violin Concerto No.1, played by Julia Fischer, with precision, passion, and great mastery. The conductor was Yakov Kreizberg.

Low strings open the first movement, Notturno, in contrast to the high register dominating the mid-point of the movement, with stratospheric violin enhanced by harp harmonics and celesta, and an eventual descent back to lower strings and timpani. The manic, pesante-like Scherzo even has the celesta player beating a tambourine. The third movement, a Passacalgia, outlines a theme related to Beethoven’s Fifth and to the Seventh Symphony of Shostakovitch. Lumbering through the low brass and pizzicato contrabass, it takes on a strident quality when it cycles around to the solo violin. Seamlessly emerging from the passacaglia, the arpeggios outlined by the violin lead to an electrifying, complex, difficult and long cadenza. To lighten the atmosphere, the Burleske comes right after, with its grotesque character, true to the Shostakovitch style.

At the intermission I was able to hear the last work on the Klangforum Wien program, La harpe de mélodie, by Brice Pauset...an aggressive, yet spacious work played with great commitment and featuring two percussionists.