"'At night there is almost complete darkness", says young German conductor and composer Oskar Jockel (°1996) about his retreat somewhere in the mountains, where he composed his Nox Aeterna (eternal night or eternal darkness), the opening piece of this NTR matinee concert. "No city lights blind the eye, no street lamps spread their glow in the clouds. In Western thought, darkness is often associated with the sinister and the dangerous. This work, on the other hand, is a hymn to darkness, to the mystical", says Jockel.
Jockel wrote Nox Aeterna on commission of the Matinee and could pull out all the stops because he had access to the forces needed for the rest of the program. Before the intermission Jean Sibelius' (1865–1957) violin concerto with a violinist who, before starting on Sibelius, first performed at the end of Jockel's work and then, as the first work after the intermission, György Ligeti's (1923–2006) Lux Aeterna for choir, and then Langgaard's enormously scored Muziek der Sferen.
Jockel's "Eternal Night' is in a sense a counterpart to Ligeti's 'Eternal Light'. Not only darkness opposed to light (Jockel used the same liturgical text from the Requiem Mass as Ligeti but replaced the word "lux" with "nox"). But also through the contrast between Ligeti's technically demanding, but relatively modest, here performed with double instrumentation 16-part a cappella work and Jockel's gigantic instrumentation. An even larger orchestra than that of Langgaard's work, with for example eight horns instead of four and, alongside the organ that Langgaard used, electronics while retaining Langgaard's four timpanists. The solo violinist who performed at the end of Nox Aeterna and subsequently in Sibelius' violin concerto.
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Conductor composer Oskar Jockel with members of the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest in the NTR ZaterdagMatinee[/caption]
Jockel let his own piece transition without interruption (attaca) into Sibelius' violin concerto and in the second part of the concert there was likewise no pause between Lux Aeterna and Muziek der Sferen, a formula that would also make a concert like this very suitable for serious pop audiences even though most of the audience appeared to have been born at a time when Sibelius was just barely still alive. The repertoire was very suitable for such younger audiences. Nox Aeterna is, with all its gigantic flourishes, a relatively easy-on-the-ear piece. The rhapsodic character of Sibelius' violin concerto is no difficult material for the modern interested ear. Of Lux Aeterna from 1966, the composer himself could never have imagined it would become a cult hit before filmmaker Stanley Kubrick would place it in a striking location in the score of his 2001 Space Odyssey in 1968.
During the fading sounds at the end of Nox Aeterna, violinist Elina Vähälä had already come from the back of the hall, playing, down the center aisle towards the stage to play the opening notes of Sibelius there, while the choir meanwhile exited the hall in a row in the opposite direction and the very last string sounds of Jockel's composition transitioned into the first string sounds of Sibelius.
Around me there was criticism of Nox Aeterna, namely that despite the enormous amount of notes and the voluminous display it was still written too easily, too predictably. I experienced Nox Aeterna as a warm sound bath. Yes, it is now 110 years after Langgaard and if you compare the two, you might get the impression that not much has happened since then. The piece is a reaction to everything that has happened in the meantime through Ligeti and for example Varèse and Xenakis and perhaps also an answer to the more consumptive musical practice of now. Nox Aeterna is therefore indeed a phase in an evolution. Admittedly, not a radical mutation, but in biology atavism (making an evolutionary leap backwards) is also a manifestation of evolution and I would not classify this work as musical atavism, by the way. It also sounded so beautifully in this hall. For example an impressive series of orchestral clusters around rising harmonies around the choir. Regularly the percussion hammers through all of this.
It seems to me, moreover, that at the location in the mountains where Jockel composes you can see myriads of stars and planets in the night sky instead of complete darkness. The kind of sky that Stanley Kubrick impressively managed to depict in 2001 Space Odyssey and for which, to portray that, he used among other things Ligeti's Lux Aeterna and further passages from his Requiem and Atmosphères.
In Sibelius' violin concerto Elina Vähälä acquitted herself with verve of the devilishly difficult solo part and conductor and orchestra beautifully underscored the rhapsodic character of the work and, with the last thin sounds of Jockel's Nox Aeterna as a prelude, it also became clear again how ingenious the opening of this concert is. Vähälä does not belong to the category of superstar soloists who have performed the concerto repeatedly over the past years, but precisely because of this it was less as if a great reputation stood between the score and the sounds.
A singer from the Groot Omroepkoor once told me that the difficulty in singing Lux Aeterna is that you have to listen to your fellow singers simultaneously and not listen to them. Listen to know where you should be in pitch, but not because you can be led tonally astray precisely when the singers around you are all singing in semitone differences from you and from each other. Perhaps in this double casting the pairs had support from each other.
Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) is one of the most intriguing composers in music history. He completed his first symphony at seventeen, and it was performed by the Berliner Philharmoniker in 1913.
In that work, the usual late romanticism clearly resonates, just as with his Carl Nielsen, twenty years his senior, for a time his teacher. Three years later he was already working on the radically different work that sounded last Saturday in the NTR-Matinee in the Concertgebouw and has been a Spotify favorite of mine for years: Sfaerernes Musik, Music of the Spheres. A world or let us say a universe of difference from that symphony. But at the same time testifying to the same urge to create music.
Many of his symphonies and other works can be found on Spotify and YouTube, under renowned conductors such as Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Thomas Dausgaard and Leif Segerstamm. In the concert hall they are hardly heard. The Berliner Philharmoniker played that first symphony four years ago for the first time again, almost 110 years after the premiere and beautifully recorded under Sakari Oramo, but I doubt that symphony has ever been performed in the Netherlands and Belgium.
This was the first performance of Sfaerernes Musik in the Low Countries ever. The work, incidentally, had only two performances at the time, in 1921 and 1922 in Germany. Then it took until 1968 before it was performed anywhere again, in Stockholm, under none other than Sergiu Commissiona. 1968 was in the heyday of hippie culture and Sfaerernes Musik could certainly have appealed as hippie music. During his lifetime, a considerable part of Langgaard's oeuvre was never performed at all. He stubbornly continued to compose. In 1945 he had composed a Free Piano Sonata in which the formal structure and duration are left to the pianist himself. A piano trio somewhere in his oeuvre could easily have been by Franz Schmidt. The relatively early Sfaerernes Musik is a pars pro toto of his multifaceted oeuvre that cannot be put under one heading. Meanwhile, in 1940, after many failed attempts in Copenhagen, he gained a foothold with a permanent position as church organist in the small town of Ribe on the Jutland coast.
Perhaps he was not a nice man either. But what is cause and what is effect? If, for example, there was ever love for the person from whom he had received a month of lessons in counterpoint at age thirteen, Carl Nielsen, that love did not last forever, as evidenced by his cantata, for approximately Berlioz Requiem scoring, large choir, large orchestra and organ, Carl Nielsen, vor store komponist! ('Carl Nielsen Our Great Composer!') from 1948. 32 measures on a text full of sarcastic insults, composed for organ and choir, which according to the manuscript were to be repeated 'for all eternity'. In a preface the composer regrets that he had to accept the necessity throughout his life of living and breathing in the world of Danish music, which was contaminated by Nielsen. Langgaard felt surrounded by a 'demonic wall' and believed that everyone was against him. There is a beautiful recording of it under Gennady Rozhdestvensky, who, incidentally, limited it to 8 minutes and 48 seconds.
Music of the Spheres was thus rediscovered at the end of the sixties. Ligeti is even known to have said that Langgaard was fifty years ahead of him in his sound world. The music is built from clusters, a technique that, besides Ligeti, his contemporary Xenakis would employ. Langgaard went very far in this.
Now we hear pentatonic sound sequences simultaneously with hyperchromatric modulations. We hear polytonal passages alongside chorale-like sounds in church modes. Consider that in a parallel universe, the US, Ives was also stubbornly working alone on such collage music and that at the same time in his equally idiosyncratic Concord Sonata from 1915 he also included that beautiful chorale section The Alcotts. The organ was used extensively. Despite the enormous orchestra, he keeps entire sections in pianissimo, as Kubrick later wanted to let space sound in his Space Odyssey 2001. This makes the tutti passages even more compelling with those four timpanists, three percussionists, the substantial brass section and the organ. That tonality that keeps trying to come through, interrupted by a timpani drone in a contrasting key! And at some point he also cites the groundbreaking E-flat major opening chord from Wagner's Rheingold.
Could Kubrick have used Sfaerernes Musik for his film? Or would that have been a form of painting red red, a pleonasm, precisely because Langgaard himself wanted to make the universe sound. The secret of 2001 Space Odyssey is also what you don't see, what has been omitted, the mystery of the monolith, the relationship with chimpanzee society, who or what is behind the computer HAL, or whether it was a preview of technology spiraling out of control, or even the emergence of consciousness in the computer; and then that majestic ending in another world, but which? In contrast with Ligeti's music, a kind of vacuum layer emerges between image and sound, which further reinforces that deliberately cultivated sense of alienation that the film generates. In the major Hollywood science fiction films like Star Wars and Star Trek, the usual music further diminishes any remaining mystery.
