WORDS MISUNDERSTOOD The arts reflect the sensibilities of their age. Some works embrace the status quo in style and substance. Others are ahead of their time and must wait to find acceptance, or even acknowledgement that they exist. This program of music most listeners may never have heard is an opportunity to open ears and take in an array of sound worlds. ChamberFest Cleveland co-artistic director and pianist Roman Rabinovich calls it “a funky program, not without humor.” The evening’s title, like so many others at this year’s festival, comes from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which the characters of the painter Sabina and her lover, the professor Franz, are constantly testing one another’s limits. “If I were to make a record of all Sabina and Franz’s conversations, I could compile a long lexicon of their misunderstandings,” Kundera writes. Franz goes further, questioning the ability of words to communicate and espousing the ineffable power of music. As Kundera writes of Franz, “what he yearned for at that moment, vaguely but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy allencompassing, overpowering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word!” No words, but certainly hints of misunderstanding, greeted the September 1963 premiere in Hilversum, the Netherlands, of György Ligeti’s Poème
audacious absurdity, but everyone sat politely afterwards as Ligeti explained
symphonique, which is scored for the unusual instrumentation of 100
his creation, in German. (The video was never broadcast and only rediscovered
metronomes. The work couldn’t be more different from the composer’s
in recent years.)
Six Bagatelles performed earlier this season at ChamberFest. As a video of the premiere of Poème symphonique made for Dutch television reveals,
Seven decades later, Poème symphonique remains an invigorating example
the audience sat uneasily as 10 men and women dressed in concert attire
of Ligeti’s relentless exploration of sonic possibilities. The piece also was the
wound up the metronomes, turned them on (at Ligeti’s signal), and left the
composer’s way of criticizing what was happening in the music world at the
platform. During the 10 minutes that followed, the metronomes ticked away
time. “What bothers me nowadays are above all ideologies (all ideologies, in
at different tempos, the textures thinning and the rhythmic motion decreasing
that they are stubborn and intolerant towards others), and Poème symphonique
as machines gradually dropped out, leaving a single metronome to have its
is directed above all against them,” he wrote. “So I am in some measure proud
dying say (minus words). Some listeners snickered at the sound of so much
that I could express criticism without any text, with music alone.” 31