Heinz Holliger is one of the illustrious names of post-war music. Both as a composer and a performer — a conductor and the most distinguished of oboists — he has shone for decades and, at nearly 72, has a substantial and unusual oeuvre to his name. He was the subject of a stimulating block of concerts in Hall One at Kings Place, a place, indeed, that becomes ever more artistically enterprising. The Holliger focus is typical of its approach: a guest curator, in this case the cellist Christoph Richter, takes charge of the main part of a week’s activities, ensuring that the various concerts form an integral whole and utilising a freedom to draw connections and deepen contexts rarely extended elsewhere.
Richter devised four well-packed programmes setting Holliger as a composer beside the work of his spiritual father, Robert Schumann, his Hungarian-Swiss teacher Sandor Veress and his associates Boulez, Kurtag and the late Isang Yun; and Holliger the performer beside devoted colleagues such as his wife, the harpist Ursula Holliger, the pianist Alexander Lonquich and Richter himself. A picture of the composer’s personality emerged layer by layer, “pli selon pli”, to borrow a Boulez title. He appeared not only as an oboist and a conductor, but as a pianist (in his 1961, Trakl-inspired Elis), a reciter, a lecturer (on Berg’s Chamber Concerto) and even a page-turner. Works of his from between 1958 (a student Sonatina for piano, played by Nicola Eimer) and last year were included. They involved only one or a few instruments, but a sense of larger scale, and of the elaborateness and mercuriality of his mind, came from the way some of the contextual items and his own pieces were interleaved.
A certain uncanniness attended this process. From COncErto, the semi-acronymically titled work he wrote in 2000 for the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, he drew solos for violin (Florence Cooke), viola (Hariolf Schlichtig), cello (Xenia Jankovic), horn and trombone (respectively the Royal Academy of Music students Michael Kidd and Rupert Whitehead) that were capable of standing alone. If that wasn’t odd enough, he combined several with each other to produce duos and trios that were apparently entirely adventitious, but sounded totally satisfying. And as if all that wasn’t bizarre enough, he himself contributed a couple of cor anglais solos written for him by Kurtag, inserting them into the continuous sequence not without small overlaps with his own music. By rights, this audacious confection should have been aural chaos. For some deep Holligerian reason, it was far from that.
By rights, this audacious confection should have been total aural chaos. For some deep Holligerian reason, it was far from that
A similar thing was undertaken in the closing concert, a thought-provoking exploration at once of “childhood and encryptions”, as its title ran. Pieces from Schumann’s Album for the Young were mixed up with selections from Holliger’s Duöli (2010), a series of 24 duets for two violins, written, like the Schumann, both for and about children. Schumann’s miniatures, played with concise force by Lonquich, splutter with invention, and Holliger’s have something of that quality. With a formal flexibility like that of Concerto, the duos expand to trios and quartets, and we heard Cooke, Muriel Cantoreggi and two cool 12-year-olds, Alexander Harris and Curtis Wilkinson, from Junior Guildhall, in various combinations. Holliger, sitting beside them, drily gave out the title of each tiny piece both in Swiss-German and in English, as though the animateur of some Beckett mini drama.
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I enjoyed the duos “Two Lego pieces that don’t quite fit together” (if I heard the title right) and “Droplet”, a study using the wood of the bows, and the onomatopoeic quartet “Bird Concert”.
It was a far cry from such simplicity to the second half’s account of Berg’s Chamber COncErto, by Cantoreggi, Lonquich and Royal Academy wind players under Holliger. Or was it? Perhaps the concert was suggesting that Berg’s prodigious use of ciphers and numerology in this always astonishing masterpiece — the performance had a virtuosity all the more exhilarating in the small hall — is, at heart, a kind of childish game, fun with an abacus, the equivalent of playing with mud pies. As Holliger emphasised in his talk, Berg never allows his compositional complexities to impair the consummately relaxed inventiveness of the surface.
Schumann’s peculiarly scored but captivating Andante and Variations for two pianos, two cellos and horn was a highlight of the four-day profile, as was Holliger’s extraordinary Romancendres, for cello (Richter) and piano (Alasdair Beatson), an attempt (involving much probing of the inside of the piano) to recompose Schumann’s late romances for that pairing — music destroyed by his widow, Clara, with not a scrap (not even the titular cinders) remaining, only a bit of hearsay. And one more highlight was Holliger’s dynamic oboe d’amore phrasing in a trio arrangement of Schumann’s Six Canonic Studies for Pedal Piano, Op 56. Whatever else he is, he remains a woodwind giant.