With the battle between Titans and gods on Mount Olympus, Xenakis opens 1234, a mini-festival in the great Holland Festival. In four concerts, spread over two days, it features Iannis Xenakis central. There is also an extensive exhibition dedicated to the Greek composer, who was a mathematician and architect by birth.
Say Xenakis and anyone who doesn't shrug their shoulders will run away screaming, women and children first. Neighbours can also be scared to death with his unruly, capricious and inimitable scores. Scores that are based not so much on chance as on mathematical sequences and that barely take into account the limits of the instrumentation. This applies to Nomos Alpha, for cello solo, but certainly for Terretektorh, for 88 instruments sitting not on stage or in an orchestra pit, but among the audience, with the conductor somewhere in the middle of the room.
On a much smaller scale, the spatial arrangement is also present in the opening piece Phlegra for chamber orchestra. Four strings engage in a dogged battle with horns, creating something halfway through that most resembles the busy honking of a metropolis. Funnily enough, without derailing for even a second. In the hands of Reinbert de Leeuw and the Asko | Schönberg, this is hardly possible either; the ensemble has been among Xenakis' advocates since the 1960s.
As a result, once you have heard a piece by Xenakis live, when you get home you throw all the CD recordings in the bin. Even if they were recorded by the greatest specialists like Boulez, even if they were recorded on SACD, they suddenly turn out to be bland reconstructions that barely do justice to the funny and moving passages that are indeed present in Xenakis' tight tonal sequences.
Poignancy abounds in Versuche, the cello concerto by Wolfgang Rihm, the composer who, through his opera Dionysos provided the overarching theme for this Holland Festival: order and chaos. Massive chords almost threaten to drown out the cello, but despite the dark beginning, it sounds extremely lyrical at times. To do so, soloist Sonia Wieder-Atherton all too often has to resort to the very highest regions, but despite estranged percussion effects, this 'tryst' hardly sounds chaotic, rather late romantic.
After the break, thankfully enough chaos in the world premiere of Richard Ayres' No. 46 for large orchestra. Born in England but living in the Netherlands since 1989, the composer uses a multicoloured palette in his pieces. This time, he cheerfully takes this one step further. What's coming along? Something that sounds like the start of a mangled cha cha cha, lovely waltzes that are immediately drowned out by persistent percussion, marching music that never really reaches maturity, violins that want to play a nice melody, but are rushed out of nowhere by horns, faster and faster, until everything derails into hilarious cartoon music with rhythmic accents of a typewriter. A catchy and, above all, highly entertaining work that makes one curious about his Toon Tellegen-opera The cricket recovers, later this Holland Festival.
Asko | Schönberg, Residentie Orkest conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw, works by Xenakis, Rihm, Ayres. Seen: 4 June, Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ.
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