Saturday, October 26, 2024
8:00 PM
Pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet brings dazzling elegance to Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and Antonio Pappano conducts two works that ask deep questions of humanity. Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, with its immediately recognizable opening “sunrise,” is a musical response to Friedrich Nietzsche’s metaphysical novel of the same name. Hannah Kendall uses unusual orchestral techniques and music boxes in her recent O flower of fire, inspired by the work of Guyanese-British poet Martin Carter.
Sir Antonio Pappano, conductor
Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano
Hannah KENDALL O flower of fire (American premiere)
Franz LISZT Piano Concerto No. 2
Richard STRAUSS Also sprach Zarathustra
This concert is no longer available on demand.
Sir Antonio Pappano describes the unique qualities of Hannah Kendall's music, and previews the works by Liszt and Strauss on this program, in an interview you can hear using the player above, with the transcript below.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT (lightly edited for clarity):
Brian McCreath I'm Brian McCreath at Symphony Hall with Sir Antonio Pappano, back here with the Boston Symphony for a really amazing program of music by Hannah Kendall and Franz Liszt, with Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and Richard Strauss. So Mr. Pappano, thanks so much for your time today.
Antonio Pappano Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you.
Brian McCreath I'm interested first to talk about Hannah Kendall, because you premiered this piece. Now you're giving the US premiere of O flower of fire. And I guess I'm especially interested in what you hear in Hannah Kendall's music that makes it really distinctive. We've heard some of her works here with the BSO before, but what do you hear that makes her music so distinctive?
Antonio Pappano Well, in this piece, she takes the two harps, makes them concertante instruments, so they feature as if they were playing a concerto, or almost. But they're not harps as we know them. They're harps prepared, as in prepared piano. But what are they prepared with? Nails or screws or something? No. They're prepared with Afro combs, little clips of different sizes. The technique is the normal technique of playing, but when you add glissandi - going up and down the strings with with an Afro comb, a big one and a small one - you get these incredible waves of sound and clatter and it just gives it a sound of almost a primeval, ungodly sound that I've frankly never heard before, I have to admit.
Now, she features other things that are unusual but somehow are seductive in their sound. The use of several, like 20 or so, harmonicas, different players, percussion and woodwinds are playing two at a time, blowing in and out and alternating chords, never playing together, but creating this haze of sound. And it's weird. When we hear the harmonica, what do we think? We think French music. But we think of prison, right? We think several things. But the fact that they all come in together and waft in the air, we don't know quite what to think, actually. So, it's very difficult for me to say exactly what I hear because I can't be specific about it. But somehow it creates a nostalgia of memory that I think we all share. And I think that that's important.
The string writing is very particular, often a lot of plucking, a lot of pizzicato, a lot of diminuendo, sudden crescendos. And then when they're playing normal, the speed of the dynamics is all very, very important. The cellos are asked at one point to scream like [demonstrates] with pressure on the bow. And why is all this? Well, it's Hannah's way of expressing real personal emotion and despair, even.
Now, the piece is organized, in terms of timing and tempo, starting with static states at the beginning. Two harps, very strange sound and gongs, but they all sound like gongs. This picks up momentum and leads into the first "agitato," or agitated section, which goes on, winds down then to the next static state, and so on. And the piece goes on like that. And therefore the structure is created through that, that back and forth of tempo and, frankly, of emotive intensity and lack of it, and just atmosphere. So, atmosphere and despair and angst, if you like. So that's the structure of the piece, and it's very strong, and it makes a really big effect. But it's hard to say why, but it just does.
Brian McCreath Understood. That's great. And everything that you're saying, not necessarily in its finest detail, but a lot of the broad strokes that you're describing kind of have a relationship to the way that we hear [Also spach] Zarathustra, by Richard Strauss. And I know that when you did the world premiere of Hannah's piece, also you conducted Also sprach Zarathustra. Is that an intentional link between these pieces, or is this something more that's a little bit coincidental?
Antonio Pappano It's a little bit coincidental, but of course, nothing is coincidental, isn't it? You know, there's a destiny. And I think that pieces that make you think or that create images in your mind and yet you're not sure exactly what they are, that's what Zarathustra is. I mean, maybe some of us have studied philosophy more than others, but Man on a life journey, especially Man who's bored of the so-called perfect life, where the sun always rises in that perfect way and you have the best view, no, Zarathustra comes down from the mountain and somehow wants to search out something else. He's restless. And that restless quality, those pieces share. That restless seeking, seeking information, seeking enlightenment, of course, that's very clear in Zarathustra, finally at the very end. And this, of course, we don't have in Hannah's piece, although it does slow down at the end, the kind of spiritual freedom and release. There's a certain amount of acceptance and resignation: "Ah, perhaps I've found it."
Brian McCreath With Zarathustra and your vast experience as an opera conductor, do you find [Strauss's] operatic voice in a tone poem like Zarathustra, that came before all those amazing operas that he wrote later on?
Antonio Pappano Yes, of course. But I would say that because I'm a theater person. But, you know, Strauss's father played in the orchestra at the opera in Munich. I mean, Strauss was born in the opera house and therefore, images, storytelling, all that is very, very close to my heart. It sort of defines me, because for 34 years of my life, I've been a music director of one or the other opera house. And so I do approach things that way. Of course, there's musical logic and there's some structural logic. But then of course, you have to paint, too. You have to create atmosphere. I mean, I think that's the job of a real musician.
Brian McCreath Tell me about the choice of the Liszt Second Piano Concerto for this program, because as I listened to you rehearse it just now, it sort of felt like, well, yes, this fits right in between these other two pieces. There's something about it in its character that keeps me in a certain place throughout this whole program.
Antonio Pappano Yeah. The Second Concerto of Liszt, though it's extremely lyrical, it has moments of dissonance. And what I mean by that is the devil's in it, as in most of Liszt's music. There's somehow, like Berlioz, the devil is always there, like Rachmaninoff, later. So this interchange between extreme recklessness and derring-do, and sensuality that is so sustained in this piece, I think the contrast is really, really wonderful. And then, of course, you have a bang up finale. But the piece is through-composed. All three pieces are through-composed, and I think that that's very, very interesting and that's what binds them. Therefore, they go from section to section, but the pieces are somehow joined, you're on a journey with each one.
Brian McCreath Yeah, they each have their own internal logic, whether it relates to anybody else's piece or not.
Antonio Pappano Exactly.
Brian McCreath And I've got to imagine that you've worked with Jean-Yves Thibaudet many times, and so I'm interested just in how your chemistry works with him and what you feel like he brings to this piece particularly.
Antonio Pappano I have to admit that I've worked with Jean-Yves many, many times, but not for about 15 or 20 years. So, I'm almost embarrassed to say it. For some reason, we just missed each other in the last years. And I'm so happy to be making this connection because, you know, there's a reason why somebody sustains a big career for so many years. There's this level of generosity, sensuality, elegance, and fire in his playing that is just, you know, very few people have that. And he has it in spades.
Brian McCreath We're very lucky to hear that a lot here in Boston. I've got to ask you one more thing, just about your own life, your artistic life. As you just said, you spent 34 years as the leader of one opera company or another. But the most recent turn is leaving behind Covent Garden to be now the Chief Conductor of the London Symphony, one of the great orchestras of the world. And I'm just curious about what drew you to the LSO. What is it about the LSO that's special in your mind and that you're looking forward to in the coming years that you're working with them more closely than you had before?
Antonio Pappano Well, I've known the LSO since 1996 when I first conducted them in Abbey Road Studios for a recording of Puccini's La rondine. They know me and I know them. Of course, they've had quite a lot of turnover in the ranks over the years, but we share a chemistry that's always been very natural. I can't say more than that. It just somehow, at least up till now, it works without a huge amount of effort. You give and they give you back. So it's up to you how much you have to feed them and nurture them and inform them or give them energy because they're going to give that back to you and more. So I need to stay in really good shape mentally, physically, because they're monsters. They're just incredible. They have an appetite for excellence. And also, it's one of the orchestras that travel the most. The touring is just enormous, the amount of touring. We just got back from Asia, so Japan, Korea, China. 13 concerts in 16 days. Can you imagine? So that's the kind of rhythm.
But I needed to take some distance from opera, you know, from the singers, from a situation where there's so many distractions, the stage. Look, it's been my life. I adore it. I belong there. There's no question. But I needed to just focus in on the music. Look, I've been with Santa Cecilia Orchestra in Rome for 18 years. I finished that in 2023. So being with them is an opportunity to make music at the highest level if I can deliver to them.
Brian McCreath But what strikes me about the LSO, because when they are, as you say, whatever you ask of them, they'll give it, and when they give it in their full, it is a scary orchestra. It's amazing to hear them. And they're also very distinctive. I feel like they are one of those orchestras that, when you hear them, you know it's the LSO. Same with the BSO. When you hear the BSO at their best, nothing sounds like them, but they're not anything alike. They sound different from each other, the BSO and the LSO. And so I guess I'm just asking what your impression is of that and what you look forward to hearing from the LSO and what you're enjoying about the BSO as well.
Antonio Pappano Well, hallelujah to the fact that the BSO and the LSO sound different because, you know, more and more today, the orchestras have become homogenized in their sound. We're all very professional, and the techniques of the players are just frightening now, the facility that's available to a conductor. But sound is something that is not easy to manipulate. And you have to know something about, as [conductor Sergiu] Celibidache used to say, the phenomenology of sound and cause and effect. How do you achieve a certain sound? Now the BSO's sound has very much to do with the hall that they play in. The LSO's sound has very much the fact that they don't play in a wonderful hall, and they have to create sound. They have to make sound. You hear the LSO at their best when they're on tour in the great halls. But they're forced to, if you demand it, to create sound, to seduce the hall that they play in in London, because it doesn't come naturally. Here, the richness is aided and abetted at the BSO by the wondrous quality of this acoustic. And so if your ear is able to sustain the sound along with them, the sound they produce sounds that are just miraculous here at the BSO. And I'm very, very happy to be here. And so I'm very happy to be performing Zarathustra, of course, because it's a real showpiece, and especially for sound and different sound states. You know, each of the pieces requires about-faces, on a dime, in different sections. And you have to be able to do that. And the BSO, of course, can do that. But we've had a terrific few days working, and it's just been very, again, very natural and very open.
Brian McCreath That's great. Really fascinating way to talk about each of these orchestras. I love it. That's just fantastic. Sir Antonio Pappano, it's great to have you back and thanks again for your time today. I appreciate it.
Antonio Pappano Thank you very much.