The Aldeburgh Festival marked the work of Mauricio Kagel with a weekend of rewarding performances, writes Michael Dervan.
The Aldeburgh Festival is a venerable institution. The brainchild of the composer Benjamin Britten, it is now, 27 years after his death, in its 56th year and will soon have been running longer without him than with him. Britten's works always find a special place at Aldeburgh, of course, where the composer Thomas Adès is now artistic director. This year's festival, which ends on Sunday, included staged concert performances of the opera Gloriana (based on Lytton Strachey's Elizabeth And Essex: A Tragic History and first heard in the presence of England's later Queen Elizabeth, in 1953) and a series of eight concerts entitled Britten & The Song Cycle.
The major focus of the festival's second weekend was the music of the Argentinian composer Mauricio Kagel, a youthful-seeming 72-year-old who was present for the celebration and even took part as a performer. Kagel, a teacher of Gerald Barry, defies easy categorisation. He's written a body of works that fall under the awkward banner of music theatre, although those pieces, as evidenced at the Sonorities festival some years back, are strangely impressive and anything but awkward when well performed. There's theatre, too, in those works that would never be branded as music theatre: he rarely fails to exploit the theatricality inherent in performance.
He's also written music for films, made films for music and made films for their own sake; he even worked as a film critic under the editorship of Jorge Luis Borges before he left his native Buenos Aires to settle in Cologne, in 1957.
He was once an iconoclastic, apparently card-carrying member of the high European avant-garde. His Second String Quartet of 1967, played at Aldeburgh by the Arditti Quartet, turns the medium on its head, with novel sounds from what you might call partially mutilated instruments (impeded by foreign objects, like the prepared piano of John Cage) and an ending that finds the cello upside down (scroll on the floor, tail in the air) and the cellist and viola player bowing each other's bows. It may well be a passage with haunting cello double stops that shocked the avant-garde audiences of the 1960s.
Kagel now often employs musical materials that have a patina of familiarity but work in unexpected ways below the surface. In his music the familiar becomes strange and the strange familiar, rather like, in painting, the way those portraits in which the images are made up of fruit can disorient eye and mind. With Kagel, the definition will be as shifting as quicksand, so portrait and fruit alike seem invitingly clear yet resolutely remain out of focus.
The composer was challenged in a pre-concert talk about having moved away from his early radical style. He hadn't, he said, and countered with the view that Mozart was a radical composer whose works can - strange paradox, this - be comfortably used as background music. And, as if it were not clear enough from his own polyglot musicality and the magpie nature of his work, he said: "I really don't believe that purity exists in art."
The Aldeburgh programmes offered the premiere of a string-quartet version of the early Variations, written in 1951-2, a time when the composer was being a radical in Argentina by exploring orthodox 12-tone writing. Apart from the Second Quartet, the 1960s were touched on only in a screening of the film of Match (1966), a sort of ping-pong game for two cellists, mediated by a percussionist. The piece itself was heard at last year's RTÉ Living Music festival. The film, unfortunately, was screened in a rather bleached-out video, which was a bit of a trial to look at.
The best way of placing the more recent work heard at Aldeburgh is probably by reference to Borges. Kagel, too, has that ability to suggest, with modest means, a window onto intriguing new realities - parallel universes, forgotten civilisations - whether through the cultural melting pots of two movements for salon orchestra (Norden and Westen) from a cycle called Stücke Der Windrose (Pieces Of The Compass Rose, 1993-4), which were played by the Composers Ensemble and Trio Fibonacci under Richard Baker, or the Piano Trio No 2, of 2001, which essayed a modern, Ivesian expressionism and was cunningly coupled with Ives's own trio. To put it another way, Kagel's music is like a novel meal that somehow manages to suggest, falsely, that there's a culinary tradition behind it.
The imitative, onomatopoeic sound world of Burleske (1999-2000), for choir and baritone saxophone, shows Kagel has far from abandoned the sort of material uncovered by the 1960s avant-garde - the New London Chamber Choir's performance under James Wood was part of a concert that was a pure treat. An outdoor event, A Breeze (1996), a "fleeting action" involving 111 noise-making cyclists in formation along Aldeburgh beach, took about 90 seconds to pass each listener, arousing and rewarding the curiosity of people who would not normally show the slightest interest in the work of living composers.
Ein Brief (A Letter, 1985-6) is a scena for mezzo soprano and orchestra, setting just the first two words of the fateful letter - "My love . . . " - and leaving the rest to voice and microtonally tangled orchestra (Pamela Helen Stephen with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Sakari Oramo) to clarify without the aid of text. Interview Avec D., Pour Monsieur Croche Et Orchestre (1993-4), a setting of interviews with Debussy for speaker and orchestra, was, with Kagel as gravel-voiced speaker, a rare success in the marriage of spoken word and orchestra, the music prodding at and bouncing off a fascinating text.
This was part of a BBC Symphony Orchestra concert under Oliver Knussen, whose imaginative freshness as a conductor was sadly not matched in his own new violin concerto, which exhibits rather too many well-worn virtuoso ticks and traceries.
Aldeburgh and the other Suffolk villages used for festival events - the main venue has for more than three decades been a converted maltings at nearby Snape - took on a time-warping, idyllic atmosphere over a weekend of glorious weather. Even the naturally overheating Snape Maltings could be forgiven in the circumstances.
And, over the four days I was there, the festival programme included a lot more than the Kagel, from an overly symphonic-sounding Belcea String Quartet and friends in Tchaikovsky and Strauss to a richly expressive Ives Fourth Symphony from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Oramo, a riotously energetic performance of Stravinsky's Renard (Birmingham Contemporary Music Group/Oramo) and a piano recital by Alfred Brendel, including Schubert's incomplete Sonata in C, D940, sounding infinitely wise and full.
