Tuesday, 4.22.08, 6:00 am
A Munich Home for Dessau & Ullmann
The Jakobsplatz Orchestra in Munich is a cultural and musical enrichment to what is already a culturally and musically rich town. In this, the small group – made up mostly of Conservatory graduates and students – is aided by a combination of factors. First, while there is a slew of good to world-class symphony orchestras in Munich, there are not that many professional chamber orchestras around. Among those, the Munich Chamber Orchestra (MKO), formerly under Christoph Poppen and much recorded on ECM, reigns supreme. The Jakobsplatz Orchestra vies to fill the void behind it.
Adding to the special role the Jakobsplatz Orchestra fills in Munich’s cultural landscape is its close association with the Jewish community at the Jakobsplatz. Inspired by the construction of the Munich Jakobsplatz Jewish Community Center and the beautiful new Synagogue, it was founded by young members of the Jewish community of the greater Munich region. It describes itself as “a meeting place for young Jewish and non-Jewish professional musicians” with the goal to “encourage dialogue and use the universal language of music to play a role in the culture of living together”. In that function, it adds an invaluable dimension to the Jewish cultural scene in Munich, of which the Synagogue, Museum, and Community Center in the most central location in town are only the outward statement.
Finally, the orchestra benefits from the excellently innovative and unusual programs that it presents under its young and hearteningly curious director, Daniel Grossmann. I have already written about their staging of Viktor Ullmann’s “Emperor of Atlantis”, a collaboration that was a great success not the least thanks to the Bavarian State Opera’s involvement and cooperation. (Even if the music itself is of questionable value.)
In February they put on “The Enchanted Forest”, the second part of Ladislas Starevich’s film L’horloge magique ou La petite fille qui volait être princesse (“The Magic Clock”), which is as delightful, comical, and whimsical a story of a little girl dreaming about being a (miniature) princess in a forest with all its wonder-full creatures, as the accompanying music of Paul Dessau is a treat to hear.
Accompanying this magical, relatively light, fare was Werner Henze’s “Idiot”, a small collection of dramatic scenes from Dostoyevsky’s novel (text Ingeborg Bachmann) that goes with Henze’s fiendishly difficult music that the orchestra, to be honest, coped with, rather than excelled in.
The most recent concert on April 8th featured more ambitious and – partly – rare treats. The Benno Sachs transcription of Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un faune for chamber orchestra may be rare only because the original isn’t, but it offered pleasure through transparency instead of color. The flutist had a particularly lovely, airless tone while the strings were no better than could reasonably expected: two exposed violins are always going to be a likely weak spot in such transcriptions. The orchestration for harmonium, piano, flute, cello, bass, oboe, clarinet, violins, and percussion is typical for the Schoenberg’s transcription club (of which Benno Sachs was a member) that has also brought us wonderful reductions of Johann Strauss, Bach, Bruckner, and Mahler (here, here, here, here, and here).
Things were better in Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder where mezzo soprano Ann-Katrin Naidu impressed amid the passionately, if not always faultlessly, playing band. The horn part’s difficulties demanded their tribute, but bassoon and oboe excelled. Disappointing only the meager cello tone, especially where that instrument would have been so important in the score. Instead of full, resonant, and plump pizzicatos, the player had only flat little thuds to offer.
Naidu’s voice impressed, but not without a strange impression of her gifts being attained through professional work rather than being a natural gift. The more dramatic the musical moment, the more these strengths (literally and metaphorically) came to the fore. A nice sheen – more soy milk than satin – on the attractive surface of her voice doesn’t cover the lack of natural depth or warmth. The mid and low registers promote a nice tone in her voice, but pp passages and the high notes on “Sterne” in the second song, “Dark Flames”, lied outside her comfort zone.
Stealing the show, in any event, was actor Jochen Striebeck who took to the spoken part of Viktor Ullmann’s Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (“The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke”). Grand, elaborate, ambitious, this setting of Rainer Maria Rilke’s youthful poem-cum-epic is considered Ullmann’s masterpiece which, like the Emperor, was created in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. After hearing it performed live, I am inclined to agree about the high regard in which it is held in. (Fischer-Dieskau has recorded it together with Richard Strauss’ Melodrama “Enoch Arden”, but only in the piano version, which suffers greatly in comparison to the chamber orchestra version.)
This story of a soldier, reminiscing heavily, moving to the front in Hungary in 1663, being promoted to flag bearer and then missing the battle after a love-filled night with a countess, only to find heroic death wildly storming into the enemy, was a favorite read of German soldiers in the World Wars, and has inspired not only Ullmann, but also Frank Martin, Kurt Weill, Kasimir von Pászthory, Will Eisenmann, Henri Sauguet, Douglas Lilburn, and Hermann Reutter to compose around it.
With vibraphone, harmonium, saxophone and other assorted instruments, the music made for an enthralling combination of music and monologue. Pittoresque, like music to a film. Or music as a film. One feels that the music really only affirms the mood that one assumes the poem ought necessarily to have, even if it were completely unknown prior to hearing Ullmann’s composition. All this while still sounding very much a composition of its time, or slightly before it. The roaring 20s sound to us out of this composition from the moaning 40s.
Through all this Striebeck spoke, declamed, yelled, sputtered, and waxed in as many ways as there are moods in the poem – delivering an interesting bout with the music over which had primacy, la musica or le parole.
(Another sound world that came to my mind, though unrelated in any way except loose association, is that of Hans Zender’s compositional re-interpretation of Die Winterreise – a very colorfully illustrated travelogue worth hearing for anyone without an overtly developed sense of the sacrosanctity of Schubert.)
It is moments like these – musical but also going well beyond it – that make the concerts of the Jakobsplatz Orchestra Munich so richly rewarding even when the playing often shows room for improvement and the conductor all-too-nice, a bit too well mannered with the music. A little more experience on the part of the former, a bit more grit for the latter, and continuously original programming of neglected, rare, and new works – Jewish or not, secular and sacred – will see this musical institution be indispensable to Munich’s cultural life.
Picture of Synagogue interior © Ulrike Grote