The final applause after Coptic Light by Morton Feldman feels like a rough awakening. For almost half an hour you are sucked into the slowly floating textures, until you lose your sense of time. The Concertgebouw Orchestra will close a contemporary program on Friday with this massively performed work, one of two surprising pieces on this evening.
The concerto opens with the other, Atmospheres by György Ligeti. When Feldman warps time, Ligeti breaks open space. Above a teeming, dense core, whooshing tones shoot up. At the bottom yawn echoing depths. Conductor David Robertson guards the delicate balance within the complexity of both scores.
No applause for Ligeti, because five men from the ensemble Cantando Admont immediately start with a 16th-century lamentation by Cristóbal de Morales. With their beautiful harmony singing they build a thematic bridge to Sechs Gesänge by the Swiss-Austrian composer Beat Furrer, a lamentation for the Amazon and its indigenous cultures that has its world premiere today.
‘Cedar, quebracho, lapacho, rosewood…’ The chorus booms into tree species as the strings screech like chainsaws. Flickering sound fragments evoke the fragile rainforest. The voices serve as an additional orchestral section – the shrill sopranos are very close to the shrill woodwinds. Furrer’s agitated sound world expresses despair and powerlessness, but this effect gradually weakens due to a lack of variation. It is only in the last, sixth part that the Spanish-language text gains relief in longer, polyphonic sentences.
A Dutch rarity, pas de deux by Otto Ketting, in spite of the colorful orchestration and rhythms that are heavily indebted to Igor Stravinsky, it never really gets exciting.
Furrer, Necklace, Ligeti ea
Classic
By the Concertgebouw Orchestra and Cantando Admont conducted by David Robertson.
6/5, Concertgebouw, Amsterdam.