Martin Bernheimer
A fascinating mini-festival materialised within the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center this summer. Bearing a generously vague title, Bach & Polyphonies, it was lovingly – sometimes verbosely – curated by the keyboardist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. He managed to celebrate a changing of the avant-garde at every complex turn.
When the six-programme series ended on Monday at the jazz-oriented Rose Theater, Aimard tried hard to demonstrate epochal relationships. In three cases, he paired a brief modern transcription of a Baroque offering – old music cloaked in wrong-note harmonies – with a progressive adventure. His apologia notwithstanding, the connections seemed tenuous.
Still, the novelties fascinated, even when they threatened to bludgeon the senses. The performances, moreover, were spectacular. With Ludovic Morlot, incipient maestro of the Seattle Symphony, sustaining metronomic precision on the podium, the virtuosic International Contemporary Ensemble made even the roughest places plain.
The festivities began with a clinky reworking of a Purcell fantasia by George Benjamin (born 1960). This led to his own Antara (1987), a raucous yet neatly plotted dialogue between a traditional chamber orchestra and ancient Peruvian panpipes. The pipes, not incidentally, were simulated via digital manipulation.
Harrison Birtwistle (born 1934) was represented with jolly distortions of two Bach chorale-preludes, followed by his own Slow Frieze (1996). A searching exploration of intricately ordered chaos, it shifted textures with minute care and cast a percussive pianist (Jacob Greenberg) as brave protagonist.
After a welcome interval, Luciano Berio’s tart-toned arrangement of the Contrapunctus XIX from Bach’s Kunst der Fuge gave way to Mouvement ( – vor der Erstarrung) (1984) by Helmut Lachenmann (born 1935). The subtitle translates as “before paralysis”, which, according to helpful annotation, relates to “dead movements . . . rhythms displaying an inner paralysis . . . a beetle floundering helplessly on its back”.
Possibly reinforcing the odd insect image, Lachenmann required his performers to play their instruments in unorthodox ways. There was much banging and burping, rubbing and tapping, also unison heavy breathing. The exercise evolved in explosive convolutions and convulsions. It made a mighty noise.
