Chris Swithinbank

In the last week I made a cou­ple of trips from Lux­em­bourg to Metz to hear some of the con­certs at this year’s Cen­tre Acan­thes and check out the newly opened Cen­tre Pom­pi­dou-Metz. Metz is clearly in a pe­riod of flux, re­ju­ve­nat­ing it­self with art, cul­ture and ar­chi­tec­ture, which in all hon­esty out­shine any of the rival major cities in the ‘Grande Région’ (a.k.a. Saar­Lor­Lux). None of Lux­em­bourg City, Trier, Saarbrücken or Nancy quite has the qual­ity or the cre­ativ­ity to match. (Though per­haps Metz comes across as par­tic­u­larly vi­brant when full of young com­posers and free con­certs of con­tem­po­rary music.)

“In­spired by a Chi­nese hat found in Paris…”

When I vis­ited last year, the Cen­tre Pom­pi­dou-Metz was still a build­ing site — al­beit a promis­ing one — that looked some­thing like this:

But it is now com­plete and its Chi­nese-hat in­spired roof curves el­e­gantly over a sur­pris­ingly large amount of ex­hi­bi­tion space.

A satel­lite gallery of the Cen­tre Pom­pi­dou, though quite in­sis­tent on its own iden­tity, it ben­e­fits enor­mously from its Parisian big brother’s vast col­lec­tion of con­tem­po­rary art. The in­au­gural ex­hi­bi­tion, Chefs-d’œuvre?, ranges through Pi­casso, Ma­tisse, Mon­drian, Man Ray, Cartier-Bres­son and count­less other big names, but in­tel­li­gently in­ter­min­gles these with re­lated but lesser-known works and lit­tle nuggets of local art his­tory. It car­ried on into more con­tem­po­rary works in the three upper gal­leries, but un­for­tu­nately I un­der­es­ti­mated how big the gallery is and, run­ning out of time, could only af­ford a cur­sory glance around the first upper gallery. See­ing the un­fin­ished spaces last year they seemed mod­est, but once skil­fully par­ti­tioned, cu­rated and con­verted into some­thing of a maze, much more art fits in than I ex­pected.

Lux­em­bourg’s Musée d’Art Mod­erne Grand-Duc Jean (MUDAM for short) opened in 2006, the re­sult of a lengthy, ram­bling and con­stantly meta­mor­phos­ing pro­ject. The ar­chi­tec­ture is spec­tac­u­lar in a sense. I. M. Pei’s de­sign re­flects the cen­turies of sand­stone build­ings in Lux­em­bourg’s old town and even man­ages to give the heavy walls a weight­less qual­ity as they are slit by streams of day­light, but it is a build­ing best en­joyed empty — a nice space to be in, but one in which the art often seems out of place. Cen­tre Pom­pi­dou-Metz on the other hand ex­cels in its chameleon-like abil­ity to trans­form to suit the ex­hi­bi­tion. It seems that while dis­tinc­tive on the out­side, its fab­ric is anony­mous enough to re­cede be­hind the art, rather than loom over it.

Also worth vis­it­ing, is the Fonds régional d’art con­tem­po­rain de Lor­raine, which has had in­trigu­ing ex­hi­bi­tions in its small gallery spaces both times I’ve vis­ited. In­clud­ing this time this ring of in­di­rect nat­ural light which brought a slice of the burn­ing Eu­ro­pean sun into this black room. It is the work of Amer­i­can artist Corey Mc­Corkle and is ti­tled Heili­gen­schein.

Con­tem­po­rary Celli

Both my trips took in con­certs of cello music. First a recital by the vis­it­ing tutor Anssi Kart­tunen on Fri­day, 9 July, and sec­ond the half a con­cert given by his five stu­dents on Thurs­day, 15 July. Kart­tunen is per­haps best known for his long-stand­ing part­ner­ship with fel­low Finn Kaija Saari­aho, the ma­jor­ity of whose cello works were writ­ten for him. How­ever, his Acan­thes recital stuck en­tirely to Ital­ian com­posers, in­ter­weav­ing music from ei­ther end of the reper­toire’s his­tory, from the in­stru­ment’s ori­gins in 17th-Cen­tury North­ern Italy to music of the 20th Cen­tury.

Quite pos­si­bly not to all tastes, but un­de­ni­ably in­ven­tive, Kart­tunen’s play­ing has to be amongst the most colour­ful around. Every piece is coloured in imag­i­na­tively dif­fer­ent ways quite un­like any other cel­list I have heard, es­chew­ing the con­sis­tent full­ness of tone of the Ro­man­tic soloist for a wider palette of sound that truly ex­ploits the in­stru­ment’s po­ten­tial. This is per­haps some­thing one might ex­pect of a con­tem­po­rary spe­cial­ist (es­pe­cially one fa­mil­iar with Saari­aho), but it is more sur­pris­ing when heard in older music. It can work well though and in Giuseppe Colombi’s Chi­ac­cona — def­i­nitely the pick of the Baroque pieces — the light­ness of his colours al­lowed the piece to blos­som quite mirac­u­lously from its ground bass into weight­less, in­tri­cate, higher fig­u­ra­tion. All the older works were played with a sim­i­lar sen­si­tiv­ity, feel­ing the po­ten­tial for flex­i­bil­ity with an im­pro­visatory style of play­ing, let­ting tem­pos sway quite vi­o­lently at times, but to great mu­si­cal ef­fect. Some­body de­scribed these works as ‘like sor­bets’ re­fresh­ing the palette be­tween ‘dif­fi­cult’ con­tem­po­rary pieces, but that seems to un­fairly triv­i­alise their role. They demon­strated how re­mark­ably far the tech­nique of the cello had ad­vanced in those early years. In­deed, there is much tech­nique in these works that is ex­ploited in not dis­sim­i­lar ways in the newer works. Ob­vi­ously, the more ex­tended tech­niques, found es­pe­cially in Franco Do­na­toni’s Lame, which is filled with dis­tant har­mon­ics, are ab­sent, but the dra­matic po­ten­tial of rapid fig­u­ra­tion and broad spans of range are to be found across the cen­turies. Live record­ings of two of the 20th-Cen­tury works, Do­na­toni’s Lame and Luigi Dal­lapic­cola’s Ciac­cona, In­ter­mezzo e Ada­gio, can be found on Kart­tunen’s web­site here.

His stu­dents were in at­ten­dance to learn from Kart­tunen’s knowl­edge of con­tem­po­rary music and pre­sented a pro­gramme of Au­gusta Read Thomas, Carlo For­livesi, Kaija Saari­aho, Rolf Wallin, Tris­tan Mu­rail and Beat Fur­rer (the last two both pre­sent as com­po­si­tion tu­tors). Saari­aho’s Et­incelles is amongst her less well-known cello works (when one thinks of Près, Petals, Amers or the more re­cent Notes on Light), but it could eas­ily be played more often. Short and to the point, it makes a de­light­fully im­me­di­ate and pow­er­ful im­pact with a low, vi­o­lent tu­mult be­fore rapidly spi­ralling up and away to fin­ish. The other high­light was Beat Fur­rer’s Epi­log, for three cel­los. Quiet, trem­bling waves timidly broke and skated in and out of the room with a lovely del­i­cacy that some­how man­aged to re­main un­ob­vi­ous de­spite the rep­e­ti­tious na­ture of the ma­te­r­ial.

New String Quar­tets

The sec­ond half of the stu­dent con­cert on Thurs­day saw the Quatuor Di­o­tima (not quite as lu­di­crously at­tired as on their web­site) pre­sent three of the eleven stu­dent quar­tets that they had been work­shop­ping in the course of the fort­night with a team of tech­ni­cians from Ircam pro­vid­ing the elec­tronic ac­com­pa­ni­ment to two of the three quar­tets.

The sec­ond move­ment of 32-year-old Swiss com­poser Michael Pelzel’s Vers le vent… pro­vided a vig­or­ously en­er­getic acoustic opener. A lit­tle like Dusapin in its tautly chro­matic and dis­so­nant har­mony, but with more dra­matic tex­tural vari­a­tion, an open­ing of quiet, rapid trilling was per­fo­rated with in­creas­ing fre­quency by strong ac­cents. As often hap­pens with such ‘un­ex­pected’ ac­cents that are nev­er­the­less me­tered, the ef­fect be­comes un­in­ten­tion­ally square and weak­ens as it goes on. Nev­er­the­less, two ex­cel­lently han­dled mo­ments of with­drawal from the oth­er­wise con­tin­u­ously fre­netic tex­tures re­vealed an as­sured struc­tural mind at work and it would be un­fair place a final judge­ment on a work with­out hear­ing its first move­ment.

Lisa Stre­ich’s ASKAR, which means ‘boxes’ in her na­tive Swedish, pre­sented a se­ries of more or less busy sec­tions made up of tex­tures of high har­mon­ics punc­tu­ated by sharp im­pacts — scratches and snap pizzi­cati. Close mi­cro­phones forced more of the bow noise to the sur­face, re­in­forc­ing scratch­ier el­e­ments as well as lend­ing the oth­er­wise frag­ile har­mon­ics power. The prox­im­ity ef­fect of the mi­cro­phones also lent a strong bass sound to the snap pizz, which blended well with a tape part trig­gered by the sec­ond vi­o­lin­ist Yun-Peng Zhao’s foot pedal. The elec­tronic sound seemed a lit­tle muddy with the deep clangs and scrapes of the tex­ture sub­ject to a heavy re­verb, al­most evok­ing the qual­ity of some early musique concrète. Over the course of the work the elec­tron­ics ebbed away be­com­ing less and less pre­sent and let­ting the am­pli­fied in­stru­ments re­assert their pri­macy.

The best was saved for last with Brazil­ian Aurélio Edler-Copês’s mas­ter­ful Quatuor n° 2: Punto rosso. The elec­tron­ics, this time en­tirely in real time, draped each in­stru­ment’s sound in a halo of won­der­ful colours pro­duc­ing deeply rich tex­tures si­mul­ta­ne­ously and mirac­u­lously at one with the quar­tet’s own colour. One might think of the elec­tronic en­hance­ment of the quar­tet sound in a work like Kaija Saari­aho’s Nymphéa, but it doesn’t de­scribe the es­sen­tial qual­ity that Edler-Copês’s pro­cess­ing brings to the work. So often in works of great tech­ni­cal skill — and this was vir­tu­osic in those terms — one hears the mis­for­tune of the com­poser’s dis­trac­tion by tech­no­log­i­cal dif­fi­cul­ties and a con­se­quent los­ing sight of the mu­si­cal­ity of the work, but here was a fan­tas­ti­cally ab­stract work, which re­lied lit­tle on clear mark­ers or for­mal mile­stones and yet wound its way with an un­ob­tru­sive but ir­re­sistible logic. Only the final cli­max seemed un­for­tu­nately over em­phatic or pos­si­bly under pre­pared, but even that re­sulted in a gor­geously de­tailed quiet coda. A re­lated work for small mixed en­sem­ble, Punto rosso sull’oceano, can be heard on the com­poser’s My­Space page, but it is no re­place­ment.