As i mentioned previously, the majority of this year’s AFEKT was focused on solo performers – primarily members of Ensemble Musikfabrik – with or without electronics, and these proved to be the strongest events of the festival.
Trumpeter Marco Blaauw’s opening night recital, with Tammo Sumera on electronics, was especially memorable. However, it was tough to penetrate Shatter by Estonian Marianna Liik, a world première. Typical of her work, there was a great deal of muscularity in both the trumpet and electronic parts, matched by a strong lyrical tendency, As such, there was much to enjoy – particularly the kinetics in the electronics at the start, and an elaborate solo melody partway through – yet everything about its long-term trajectory, as well as its title, seemed puzzling. Il canto della foresta by Ukrainian Adrian Mokanu brought together a stable but in flux drone with intricate solo writing above. The trumpet’s constant stream of material set it far apart from the electronics, such that Blaauw seemed to occupy the space created by the ever-changing drone.
Though simple, the effect of Elena Rykova‘s vicissitudes was considerable, using massive quantities of reverb to transform Tallinn’s modest Kanuti Gildi Saal into a vast imaginary space. Within this, Blaauw’s trumpet explored a wide gamut of musical behaviours, including very tiny sounds, variations of pitch and noise, and what sounded like sung elements. Inevitably, the trumpet was made to seem very small indeed, yet there were times when its music potentially had an impact on the reverberation itself, causing fluctuations in its quality and clarity. It brought to mind Paul Horn’s seminal proto-ambient album Inside, recorded in the Taj Mahal, demonstrating the same dual love of sound and love of the sound of their own musical voice – but not in a negative way, simply revelling in the powerful effect being created. Reverb can often be used to create a false air of profundity, but here it felt entirely appropriate to Rykova’s material and intentions. George Lewis‘ buzzing tilted the concert back into a primordial world, both raw and playful, the trumpet exploring a relationship with the electronics that veered between serious and amusing. There was something archetypal about it, moving episodically through different fundamental characters. Yet there was nothing ephemeral about this, the whole adding up to a cogent, single long-term narrative.
For some inexplicable reason, various concerts during AFEKT were programmed to happen in Tallinn and Tartu simultaneously, making it impossible to attend everything (the implication is that the organisers regard these two cities as having separate, never-the-twain audiences, and perhaps that’s true). However, while Tartu for the most part suffered as a result, it benefitted by having a packed programme on Saturday. This included the screening of three films exploring different but somewhat related radical composers: Christopher Nupen’s The Language of the New Music (about Schoenberg and Wittgenstein – a nice inclusion during Schoenberg’s 150th anniversary year), Thomas von Steinaecker’s Luigi Nono – The Sound of Utopia and Wiebke Pöpel’s Helmut Lachenmann – My Way. The first two of these films were directly relevant to the afternoon recital by pianist Benjamin Kobler (with Karl Erik Laas on electronics), which featured music by both Schoenberg and Nono.
It also included a trio of more recent works, of which Milica Djordjević‘s Role Playing 1 – Strings Attached seemed an idea better in theory than practice, its keyboard-avoiding internal high jinks emerging as haphazard and random. Maria Kõrvits‘ new piece Nobody was much stronger, having the effect of dividing Kobler into two parallel trains of thought. One was musical, and an apparent challenge, Kobler not merely working through but grappling with the material, The other was verbal, drawing on words from Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (in English translation), spoken in a way that suggested enlightenment already attained. It made for an interesting tension, caught in a dichotomy between states of becoming and being. Lithuanian composer Vykintas Baltakas‘ 1995 Pasaka / ein Märchen was by far the most impish music heard during AFEKT, a positively flamboyant display of full-on intensity. The piano notes seemed arbitrary pitch-wise, but conveyed a strong behavioural coherence, reinforced by the electronics. The flamboyance gradually developed a distinct air of zeal, Kobler becoming the, at times, literal mouthpiece for the work’s relentless, overflowing enthusiasm.
Surprisingly, and impressively, it was the older music on the programme, by Arnold Schoenberg, Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen, that made the strongest impact. This was largely due to the fact that Kobler expressed these well-known pieces in a way that made them feel entirely fresh and personal. Schoenberg’s 6 kleine Klavierstücke, Op. 19 (1911) conveyed the real sense of a multi-faceted, authentic language, playful, serious, intense, whimsical, aloof, but always determined, even earnest. The final piece – Schoenberg’s homage to Mahler, who had recently died – was exquisitely rendered, calm but utterly heartfelt. For the Fünf Klavierstücke, Op. 23 (1923), Kobler audibly upped the ante, throwing himself into the music’s bold confidence. Far from playful, they were more like a workout, focused and flexible, but strenuous too, not earnest now but pushing and driving onward. Is this what can make these pieces a tougher nut to crack? It felt almost like we weren’t meant to engage directly with the pieces themselves but with the pianist working through them. Kobler’s was a seriously powerful performance, conveying an increasing sense of passion fuelling the music.
Nono’s electroacoustic … sofferte onde serene … from 1976 emerged as an initial contrast between intensely worked-through material performed live and muffled piano impacts and resonance in the electronics. Yet the latter was almost immediately implied to be a part of the former, resulting in an impression of either two elements of a single voice, or two versions of the same music articulated very differently. In some respects it sounded like an extension of the Schoenberg but not as carefree: searingly intense, really ferocious (almost causing the two elements to fuse), yet as it continued, Kobler brought out a distinct strain of vulnerable emotion impelling the music on. Stockhausen’s Klavierstück IX (1962) demonstrated another twin mindset, undergoing a complete shift from blustery repetitions to thoughtful, less certain rising and halting chromatic lines. The tension in the two attitudes was compelling, walking a line between demonstrative and questioning,
At the end of the festival, the recital given by clarinettist Carl Rosman featured a mixture of the baffling and the brilliant. The former were represented by Georges Aperghis‘ Récitation 9, a stream of utterances, whispers, chatter and song articulating a strange kind of circular obsession, and Evan Johnson‘s indolentiae ars, another of the composer’s wilfully infinitesimal works that seem to offer far more to the performer than the listener.
The latter were much more rewarding. Milica Djordjević put Rosman and his contrabass clarinet through all kinds of apparent struggle in treperenje, studija I. A mix of breathy tones and assertive gruff accents conveyed an overwhelming desire to let rip, while the music often sounded trapped within the instrument, emerging in fits, starts, spasms, blurts, wildly fluctuating overtones, and timbral fibrillations. The effect was stunning (as was Rosman’s control throughout), but nowhere more so than the work’s amazing conclusion, suddenly rising into the stratosphere. Both literally and figuratively, Bethan Morgan-Williams‘ Gêmdisyn for E-flat clarinet occupied a different register, emerging from silence into a gleeful demeanour, filled with swoops and an absolute sense of joy. This was followed by more measured music, not tempered exactly, but shot through with a more thoughtful (even introspective) attitude, sustained, aerated, trilly, kind of hovering, not so much treading water as air. Whereupon the piece returned to the other side of its character, even more child-like in its sense of play, wildly calling without restraint, in the process resembling the song, call and chatter of some particularly extrovert bird.
The highlight of this recital was the complete behavioural opposite of both these pieces. You and me at the bottom of the sea by Joseph Andrew Lake, receiving its first performance, took the form of an extended sequence of extremely faint sustained sounds, half air, half pitch, shaped not into phrases as such but more like harmonically- and timbrally-altering exhalations. While its language was at the threshold of audibility (in a more meaningful way than in Johnson’s piece), this was not a fragile or weak music, articulating the palpable sense that we were privy to something small and intimate, exruciatingly so, a soundworld that would be shattered by the intrusion of any other sonic element. It was like hearing a heavily-filtered reduction of something originally much more detailed, heard from a (probably great) distance. The work’s long duration only bestowed on the music greater intensity, even passion, suggesting the possibility of the back-and-forth of a conversation, akin to a form of higher-pitched whalesong. Though Rosman surely couldn’t physically, the music could have kept going for so much longer – it was as riveting as it was surprisingly moving.
