Album Review: Wien Modern

Album Review: Wien Modern

“Wien Modern,” (1990) named for the Viennese festival of the same name, is the first of several CDs released by Deutsche Grammophon featuring performances from said festival. This edition features Pierre Boulez’s Notations, György Ligeti’s Atmosphères and Lontano, Luigi Nono’s Liebeslied, and Wolfgang Rihm’s Départ. All of the pieces on “Wien Modern” are performed by the illustrious Vienna Philharmonic (VPO) under the direction of Claudio Abbado (the founder of Wien Modern), with the additional vocal forces of the Vienna Jeunesse-Chor for the Nono and Rihm pieces. The VPO, generally associated with 18th and 19th century Austro-Germanic repertoire, rarely performs such thoroughly modern works as it does here, yet the musicians do not sound at all out of their element. Though recorded away from their normal home in the Musikverein, the orchestra sounds no less spectacular in the Wiener Konzerthaus, where there is enough “air” in the recordings to give a real sense of depth (especially important in the Ligeti pieces) while sacrificing none of the finer details of the scoring.

Notations by arch modernist Pierre Boulez is an orchestrated version of an earlier set of piano pieces, of which four are included here. In his later works Boulez developed a smoother, restrained style characterized by an almost palpable textural sheen, but what we have here is a product of a brasher young Boulez: rhythmically propulsive, aggressive and relentless, with shrieking winds and brass stabs reminiscent of the most abrasive passages in Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces. While no one would call Notations “beautiful” in the traditional sense, its frantic energy communicates an excitement that might make it more accessible to casual listeners than its otherwise dense language would suggest.

Both Ligeti pieces are completely different in character from the Boulez pieces. Ligeti specializes in lengthy passages of gradual sonic morphing that sound remarkably like the work of a sound designer in a studio – except of course played by almost a hundred musicians, and this is the Ligeti we hear on both of these pieces. Atmosphères has become something of a modern classic, featuring one of the most viscerally gripping contrabass passages I can think of (essentially using just repeated bass sustain notes of various dynamics and length to create a seething, engine-room-like texture). Today the nebulous tone clusters and ethereal orchestration may inadvertently make us think of horror movie soundtracks, for good reasons: Lontano was used in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and Atmosphères in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The Rihm and Nono pieces I unfortunately have a much harder time warming up to. Perhaps it has to do with the sparser pointillist textures employed, or the Pierrot Lunaire-esque (a Schoenberg piece I doubt I will ever like) vocal parts that sound part song, part poetry reading. The Boulez and Ligeti pieces sound like difficult but ultimately rewarding pieces of 20th century music because there is at least a semblance of organization and a hierarchy of musical ideas. The Rihm and Nono pieces sound just a little too deliberately random for my tastes. I know that new works often require several listenings to be properly digested, but my experience with hearing the Ligeti and Boulez pieces for the first time was that I didn’t necessarily understand what I was hearing, but I liked what I heard and wanted to hear it again. I can’t say I feel compelled to listen to the other two works again and again in the hope I will eventually have an “ah-ha!” moment of understanding. I don’t think either the Vienna Philharmonic or Abbado is at fault here – it is just a particular brand of 20th century music which I have always had a hard time stomaching.

For those curious about 20th century classical music I would still recommend the CD for the Ligeti and Boulez pieces, and perhaps you will find more to the Rihm and Nono pieces than I did.

- Alex Temple