The eminent and prolific German composer Wolfgang Rihm has died. With some 500 works to his name – including operas, orchestral music, and chamber pieces – Rihm is said to have been one of the most frequently performed contemporary composers in Europe.
While no one would ever describe his music as a laugh riot, this is one of his more accessible works, helped along no doubt by the performance by violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter. The piece is called “Lichtes Spiel” (“Light Game,” or “Light Play”) and was composed in 2009. German-speakers might also detect it as a pun on “leichtes spiel” (“an easy job,” or more idiomatically, in English, “child’s play”).
Rihm, who lived with cancer for over a quarter century, died on Friday. He was 72 years-old.
It’s been observed (and borne out) that composers are not always the best interpreters of their own music. But when composer Péter Eötvös turned his hand to conducting Beethoven, the result was one of the most thrilling 5th Symphonies I have ever heard.
Eötvös, born in Transylvania, was aided and encouraged by Zoltán Kodály at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, and Béla Bartók was in his blood.
He continued his studies in Cologne with Bernd Alois Zimmerman. He also apprenticed with Karlheinz Stockhausen, working as Stockhausen’s engineer and copyist, and kept up his modernist credentials as a founding member of the live electronics-heavy Oeldorf Group and director and conductor of the Pierre Boulez-founded Ensemble InterContemporain.
In addition, he was drawn to the music of Renaissance madman and murderer Carlo Gesualdo and American jazz.
Eötvös composed in many genres, including experimental music for film and at least 13 operas.
To my ears, he was at least as good a conductor as he was a composer. Eötvös died yesterday at the age of 80. R.I.P.
Conducting Liszt’s “Dante Symphony”
His own “The Gliding of the Eagle in the Skies”
“Dialog mit Mozart”
Beethoven (each of the four movements posted separately)
Disoriented by Brian Ferneyhough? John Travolta and the Joker are with you, not quite sure what to make of the composer’s Second String Quartet. The high priest of New Complexity turned 80 yesterday.
Monday is just about the only day I’m not around a computer, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s also the time that Harrison Birtwistle, ever the contrarian, died.
I know I’ve posted here before about my complicated relationship with this composer. Despite sharing his fascination with Gawain, Punch, the Minotaur, Anubis, Orpheus, King Kong, and any number of other subjects that form the bases for his operas and concert works, I find he’s someone whose music I have only ever moderately warmed up to.
In common with Peter Maxwell Davies, his former colleague of the Manchester School of composition, Birtwistle emerged from a working-class Lancashire background to radically modernize British music. But unlike Max, whose palpable sense of mischief made even his most scandalous works somehow approachable, Birtwistle never cracked a smile, unless perhaps it was at the audience’s expense.
I don’t really need music to be “easy,” necessarily, or even tonal. There are times when I can put on a Birtwistle record and totally go with it. But I don’t know that anything he has written has ever engendered much affection in me. This is not an objective assessment, of course, and perhaps you will react differently.
Interestingly, Birtwistle had a local connection. He attended Princeton University on a Harkness Fellowship, beginning in 1965. There, he completed his opera “Punch and Judy,” which begins with Punch tossing his baby into the fire This commences a murder spree that includes the stabbing of Judy, his wife. All is presented in human form, making it that much more disturbing than when enacted by puppets. The experience proved to be so unpleasant that Benjamin Britten walked out on the premiere.
Perhaps you will find something to latch on to in one of these pieces recommended by The Guardian.
If I had to recommend a place to start, it would be “Earth Dances” from 1986.
There is something primordial in Birtwistle’s work, but it is not someplace I generally choose to live. At least his music has integrity, which I can’t always claim for some contemporary works of an easier-going disposition.
See what you think.
Also, “The Moth Requiem” is a little gentler than most.
