Mantra (I): Pushing for Jussen brothers swaying Stockhausen #HF17

Lucas and Arthur Jussen are 'hot'. You could call the young piano brothers the headliner of this Holland Festival Proms. Well before the start of their concert, therefore, visitors are already gathering in the corridors around the main hall of the Concertgebouw. Everyone is out for a good seat. To sit, because standing, as we know from the BBC broadcasts of the promenade concerts from the Royal Albert Hall, is out of the question. So it's pushing it and that for Mantra by Karlheinz Stockhausen!

Off the beaten track Jussen

At the invitation of the Holland Festival, the Jussen brothers tackled the famous piece. Such absolute, serial work is far removed from their normal repertoire. In it we find Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven and Chopin. In recent weeks, Lucas and Arthur left no stone unturned as far as Jinek to emphasise that they have delved deeply into the subject matter. A team of Stockhausen specialists provided their guidance and in six months' time the duo rehearsed the dog-eared work.

All together at the Stockhausen

The festival programmer appears to have made a golden move. Presenter Klaas van Eerden may have miserably dismissed Mantra as "incomprehensible" in his announcement, but because the Jussen brothers are playing the piece, the Concertgebouw is packed. How different would it have been if new music specialists like Tamara Stefanovich and Pierre-Laurent Aimard had performed the work? A idea thereof we got two years ago in a meagrely filled Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ.

And so you see... The Jussen brothers appear from DWDD to Koffietijd with their special brother story, swelling their popularity to star status. Based on that, audiences do come en masse and - that's where the gold shines - en passant hear Mantra in its entirety. From that squeaky-voiced Stockhausen, that is.

Asking the impossible

Lucas and Arthur Jussen more than manfully beat their way through the piece for two pianists (and not: two pianos!). "Doing Stockhausen justice" is how they described their goal. They largely succeeded. Rehearsing Mantra in a short time, alongside a totally different repertoire, shows guts. The Jussens rave, rant, flame and even swing a little with equal bravado; on the keys as much as in operating the ring modulators and playing small percussion.

Knowing is one thing

Still, it is clearly audible that the Jussen brothers play what is there and by the looks of it are already very happy with it. The knowledge they acquired while rehearsing does not come out fully. Lucas and Arthur know, so they tell in De Groene: "If you have two notes, only those notes and nothing else." So no phrasing, no style or syntax. The science is there with the brothers. But they don't. Where the piece picks up tempo, they fall back on their default-position. Especially in the first movements, the cascades of notes gurgle not staccato and fierce, but heavily romantic and panache. In slower passages, the brothers sometimes seem to wade wistfully dreaming through treacle.

No choice

You could say that this gives them their own twist on Stockhausen's punishing work, but that's not how it works. His work cannot bear that. After all, Lucas says in De Groene: "This is not music you can force your own interpretation on." After which Arthur adds: "[...] so compulsively written that as a player you have no choice."

Merry banter

Mantra is supposed to quiver as if in a busy conversation. Then it is like two poets reciting one poem. First a stanza in turn, then a line, then a word and finally alternately by syllable. However, the Jussen brothers, in their woolly 'diction', make Mantra emerge just at those crucial moments as if two aunts with a lawyer behind their teeth are chatting merrily. Also nice. But this is how Mantra immediately comes off a little less well. Part of the play's internal logic is lost. Say: sweet versus battle mode.

Still a long way to go

Lucas and Arthur Jussen nevertheless deliver a sterling performance. If only because they dare to treat their audience to Stockhausen. And so together with their fans outside the comfort zone steps. Perhaps the idea is to reprise this piece in a big way in five and 10 years' time. Perhaps we will hear the growth then; in musical and life experience, but especially in the idiom that has sunk in. Then no meritorious reproduction but sublime musicianship. With Stefanovich and Aimard, after all, there was no relief that they had crossed the finishing line in one piece. On the contrary: they were - especially in the fervently animated deepening of the piece - far from finished.

Insulting

What you can finish quickly, though, is the piece Sacred Environment by Kate Moore which will have its world premiere at the Proms. The young composer travelled to Australia where some of her roots are and returned with an oratorio for large orchestra, large choir and didgeridoo.

The work is insultingly flat, ethnocentric Western. The Australian landscape is sacred to Aborigines. They live in unity with it, with their rituals in which, among other things, the didgeridoo plays an important sacred role. Moore has the orchestra rattling in all parts at stale-classical hurricane force; Orff's setting. The choir roars stormily through the hall and soprano Alex Oomens fights unintelligibly for her place. Dense, invariably culminating in triple-forte climaxes, nothing new under the sun.

Excuse-Truus

Lies Beijerinck has very little to say on didgeridoo, as Moore muffles some simple parts in the violence. On many a street corner, you can hear more meaningful didgeridoo playing, even though Beijerinck has so much more to offer. In this white-washed discourse that brims with big-bigger-biggest, the didgeridoo loses out as an excuse-Truus: painful.

Post-rock

Recently, new work by Moore was played in The Hague. It sounded like a direct copy of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Explosions in the Sky. Right: post-rock bands. They take classic overpowering build-ups to crescendos and translate them into rock band arrangements. And to tension arcs that are shorter, but work in a rock venue.

Pooh-pooh

Moore re-translates that work back to symphony orchestra and again stretches the length very far. Thus, her compositions are not only highly unoriginal; they also lack tension. Indeed, Moore's pieces - as Sacred Environment proves once again - show a nice talent for arranging, but not the beginning of a mature idea of her own. Let alone: of any relevance with the fuss draped around them about Australian roots in the landscape there. Indeed, there are none to be found. Men at Work and Kylie Minogue have worked more substantively with the legacy of their down under-origin than Kate Moore shows here. This exercise in musical regression might as well have been called Requiem for Johan Cruijff.

Living landscape

American composer George Crumb - in focus at this year's Holland Festival - wrote A haunted landscape back in 1984. In the Netherlands, we never heard the work. A crying shame, because the haunting piece featured fragments of ghostly apparitions through thinly lit landscapes. Think of atmospheres that David Lynch can effortlessly provide with striking images. A play, moreover, with memory; even where it is not 'real'; can be. So it is déjà vu; awe for that feeling that a landscape evokes, captured in crisp, progressive composition that is full of eloquence. Then the orchestra may thunder a little too loudly over the piano, but even then that unwaveringly original Crumb voice is loud (but anything but rock hard) and clearly audible in all its openness and serenity. There and then, landscapes - however bewitched - do go spiritually alive.