KALEIDOSCOPE
CHAMBER COLLECTIVE
St
James’s Church, Chipping Campden *****
Chipping Campden Music Festival’s programming is always magnetic
in its fascination, and this offering from the remarkable Kaleidoscope Chamber
Collective was brilliant in its powers of attraction.
Its theme was Vienna, beginning innocently enough with
Beethoven’s C major String Quintet, delivered with total empathy and ideal
balance, but Kaleidoscope’s warm, intimate tones perhaps a tad lacking in outward
projection.
The remainder of the programme embroiled us in the febrile
atmosphere of expressionist Vienna and its incestuous artistic relationships.
Now expanded into a sextet, the players were joined by Francesca Chiejina, positioned
at the centre of a symmetrical arc of strings, her opened-eyed, vulnerable
soprano acutely responsive to four songs by Alma Mahler, their string arrangements
here revealing textural riches.
These songs shift in their conflicting moods, raise more
questions than answers, and are far more reflective of the Viennese Zeitgeist,
than her husband’s comparatively reactionary Lieder. Gustav Mahler forbade his
wife to overshadow him by continuing to compose (unlike Robert and Clara
Schumann), so it is hardly surprising that in revenge Alma started to assemble
herself a portfolio of lovers from other art disciplines: architecture,
literature, painting.
Before marrying Gustav, however, Alma had been involved in a
relationship with her composition teacher Alexander von Zemlinsky (also teacher
of Arnold Schoenberg, who later became his brother-in-law), and we heard here
Zemlinsky’s Maiblumen bluten uberall. This unfinished setting of a poem by
Richard Dehmel bears fidgety tempo indications affecting what seems like every
bar of this attenuated piece, tactfully rendered by Chiejina and the willing
Kaleidoscope, but nothing could deny that this fragment should never have been
rescued and published, and how much it is a blatant steal from the Schoenberg
masterpiece which concluded this enthralling programme.
Verklarte Nacht is an early work of Schoenberg’s, a
tone-poem reflecting Dehmel’s poem of two lovers conversing in a nocturnal
woodland, the woman telling her lover that she is carrying another man’s child,
her lover responding that he will cherish both her and the child as his own.
This deeply searching scenario was conveyed with gripping
emotional strength by the Kaleidoscope sextet (far more involving and intimate
than the glossy string orchestra transcription), patiently built, solos
emerging naturally and unflashily from the context, and creating an absorption
which blessedly was not broken at the conclusion until hugely enthusiastic and
grateful applause eventually erupted.
My only wish is that the Beethoven could have been replaced
with Mahler’s youthful Piano Quartet, thus making this a complete picture of
art nouveau Vienna – but that would have raised logistical and indeed financial
issues. My farewell to Chipping Campden for this year is to praise the beautifully-illustrated
programme-book covering the entire festival fortnight, and a snip at £10.00.
Christopher Morley