It is a Brussels ensemble at a Ghent festival, in the 19th-century Lullyzaal of the opera with 20th-century music that in the 21st century is still called contemporary by many. Music by Arnold Schönberg, performed "in the spirit of Schönberg" as the concert title says.
You should see it as a re-enactment of what happened exactly 100 years ago in his Verein fur Musikalische Privataufführungen. The five members of Het Collectief vouch for that. Schönberg had had enough of music education of his time and, like everywhere else in Europe, wanted to reform that education as a pedagogue. Think of Steiner, Montessori, Russell... With his initiative, his concert organization, his Verein, he wanted to break with the customs of the traditional Viennese establishment. What the public thought of it was of no concern to him. Besides, the press was not allowed there to write about it then. Only artists and "art lovers" were welcome. Then a work could, to understand it properly, even be performed a second and... third time. And don't think that only works by Schönberg were to be heard. That will be the case now too. First Debussy, and twice Schönberg. Festival dramaturg Jan van den Bossche tells us all this in his excellent introduction.
Debussy's Prélude à l'après midi d'un faune needs no separate discussion. And with the experience and maturity of Het Collectief it sounds wonderful. How delightfully Toon Fret on flute and Julien Hervé on clarinet take over the themes of the work from each other and pass them on to each other, supported by two string players and an excellent pianist. They performed it in a new arrangement by the young Belgian composer Tim Mulleman.
Schönberg did not like his compositions being called atonal. They had a "different" tonality, he thought. And you understand that most easily when you hear that Verklärte Nacht, especially in that somber arrangement for piano trio by Steuermann. An extremely concentrated cellist, violinist and pianist each bring, with their own sound world, their timbre and temperament, the poignant story of the man whose wife confesses to him on a moonlit night that she is carrying another man's child. In the music you hear the dramatic course of the walk and the conversation, right up to the resolution: the sad husband's acceptance of the transgression.
Real Schönberg as we really know him from music history lessons, with those sounds new for his time and his audience, came with the Kammersymphonie no. 1. He composed it for an ensemble of 15 musicians, but asked his best student Anton Webern to make an arrangement for five soloists, and that was also what we heard from Het Collectief. It was on the program at their first concert in 1998. And so they have it down pat. Perhaps more difficult for the audience now than the accessible pieces it heard first. But the performers themselves played it with obvious pleasure. And it lends itself to it, with its many unexpected turns and flourishes. That was an exuberant finale.
The applause afterwards lasted a long time. Whereupon Toon Fret, always up for a joke, asked the audience if they wanted to hear that last piece once more as it happened in the time of Schönberg's Musikverein. He did not wait for an answer, the musicians sat back down at their stands. And suddenly, for the second time, the 'tender-hearted' sounds of Debussy's Prélude rang out again to the great relief of the audience. Arnold Schönberg notwithstanding.
- WHAT: "In the spirit of Schönberg", Prélude à l'après midi d'un faune, Claude Debussy [arr. Tim Mulerman], Verklärte Nacht, Arnold Schönberg [arr. Eduard Steuermann], Kammersymphonie no. 1 [arr. Anton Webern],
- WHO: Het Collectief [Wibert Aerts (violin), Julien Hervé (clarinet), Thomas Dieltjens (piano), Toon Fret (flute), Martijn Vink (cello)]
- WHERE: Lullyzaal, Opera Gent (as part of Gent Festival van Vlaanderen)
- WHEN: Tuesday 7 September 2021