On Saturday, Gweneth Ann Rand performed the first of two Messiaen song cycles at the Aldeburgh Festival. This deeply moving event had a profound effect. In truth, I don’t feel equipped to review it fully, as the work is complex and entirely new to me. Properly analysing it would require more time spent researching than the performance itself. Yet documenting this experience, is essential—it goes to the heart of what Thoroughly Good is about.
Messiaen’s Harawi Song Cycle is a technicolour exploration of loss and grief manifest in fiendish writing for both pianist and soprano. It’s deep, challenging and highly unconventional it’s in musical language. Yet, it is a beguiling work, both unsettling in the language it uses and consoling at the same time. It is this paradox that illustrates how classical can when it’s least expected have a profoundly transformative effect.
Written in 1946 five years after Messiaen composed Quartet for the End of Time whilst a PoW in Nazi Germany, Harawi is only a few older than the Aldeburgh Festival and Arts Council, both institutions established when art was undergoing considerable innovation.
The establishment of Festivals like Aldeburgh (the performance formed part of the opening weekend for the 75th Festival) and Edinburgh capitalised on a renewed enthusiasm for classical, opera and the wider arts. Both Festivals continue to demonstrate the founding spirit and and an ongoing commitment to platform important works as well as driving innovation. It’s somewhere like Aldeburgh you’re most likely to hear the niche and unfamiliar.
Harawi like many other works of the period represents the innovation admired by artists of the time that led to the establishment of institutions like Aldeburgh and the Arts Council that bridged the gap between innovation and audiences, and helped secure interest for them amongst future generations.
We hear it now because of the passionate advocacy of artists then, a thought that resonates throughout the performance at Aldeburgh on Saturday. The constantly shifting multimedia artwork adorning the back wall of the Britten Studio (Rachel Jones and Cynthia Igbokwe artwork
Ben Smalley animation), added a new perspective to the work too: art building on art.
The music is heady, intoxicating and, quite unexpectedly I hear romanticism amid the intense rhythmic and harmonic complexity. I hear Turangalila Symphony in places – clusters of chords, decorative lines at the top of the piano and notes full of portent at the bottom. It is seemingly time-less yet the sounds make sense narratively on a first listen. Collectively it’s an unusual sound rooted in a surprisingly familiar sound world that is implicit.
To recognise this and feel at one with it at the same time is deeply moving, not simply because the work itself is profound but also because a lifetime of listening has collapsed in on itself. Memories of childhood where music teachers awkwardly describing music they love to their young class in language completely disconnected with present day language catapulted 20th century music into a far away land and time. It sounded silly, impenetrable and incomprehensible then. Were they out if their minds those composers and teachers? Now, forty years on it suddenly makes sense. A gift for the future created by an innovator in the past. Finally, I can connect with it.
Gweneth Ann Rand’s performance is total. She is striking presence in the performance space – strong, powerful and vulnerable. Her non-verbal communication straightens shoulders and backs. There is composure, isolation and breathtaking story in the tiniest details in her face, and a clenched fist. Wiping away a runny nose on the back of her hand after a particularly intense song, there was ambiguity – intended or simply of the moment?
Pianist Simon Lepper isn’t so much doing a marathon at the keyboard as making a Herculean effort. This isn’t an accompaniment but a duo. Both musicians necessary technical mastery never gets in the way of emotional intent. And a word too for the page turner whose concentration was total and terror kept at bay.
It is a special moment (similar to connecting with Mahler 6 at the Proms 10 or so years ago) when a connection is made. Location, score, and musicians are melded into one lasting memory. This is not a work (at least not for me yet) to revisit in recording but live and in person. So much of it is theatrical and perhaps created by the audience too.
