Libations at the Altar of Creation: Klaus Mäkelä’s Immaculate Conceptions of the 20th Century
Immersing listeners into the glistening extractions borne of struggle, the maestro and violinist Julian Rachlin swept their onlookers into alternative realities at Royal Festival Hall.
Klaus Mäkelä and Julian Rachlin at last night’s Royal Festival Hall concert. Credit: London Philharmonic Orchestra
Geometry interned art’s gems in megacorps of censorship last century. Incensing scribes and poets in an epoch coveting a place for public outcry, Soviet evictions of works deemed “unsuitable” invited greater rebels to ensue: a slew of musical responses to the plight of banned Constructivism. Through rigorously rigid amelodic lines the lyrical experimenter Shostakovich evoked shapes triangular, rectangular and square in long-held semibreves and chords slow to erode; impinging pizzicati and the matte black shade of self-redaction.
Mackles seem to marinade the indecisive moments of his Violin Concerto No. 1 in strained emancipation; painting over pregnable motifs with a symbolic trepidation. It emerges in relentless self-correction: music’s fluency exchanged for fear of truancy; true exploration slow to plodder to the fore. Enchaining strings in these exacting channels, violinist Julian Rachlin ratified a feat almost impossible in “Music from the Shadows”: a recital at Royal Festival Hall intent on showcasing the fruit of insurmountable suppression.
Delivering discreetly livid strokes to strings, the soloist afforded notes a varying finesse; contrasting beating ire and the timbre of a lyre in the space of semi-bars. By creeping into peeps of volume he embodied revolutionary artists forced to hide their innovation in tame guises. Gallops of loquacious plucks succumbed to nodding syncopation in the work’s first movement; crumbling into crumb-sized grumbles in the second. Painfully precise in every switch of tempo, Rachlin rode a series of diminuendo notes towards a ragged cliff before expelling cries of regulated agony. Entrapment of the inner state deferred before its capitalised superior as screechy sections mimicked strikethroughs’ blood-tinged pens.
Flatness and latitude contested in a testament to self-suspension at the hands of psychological detention: legato straightening itself to be transformed into a thing immutable; the act of composition in an era incomputable.
Regaling double basses with a glacially slow pace at times, Klaus Mäkelä delved no less deeply into Shostakovich’s creative stencils. Jazz came uncapped in antsy morsels swallowed quickly by submission; mitigating overreaches of dynamics to secure an overorder of precision. The result was triumph over suffocation: the imagination’s mockery of acquiescence to a creed. The more monotonous the strings remained, the less their confidential manifesto was restrained. Anaphora became an itching twitchiness enforced by stiffness; tics made intricate to lay bare dangers of conformity.
Devoid of vagaries of such a nature, Thomas Larcher’s Second Symphony – subtitled “Kenotaph” – approached a collage of the Elements more closely than a mental excavation. What the composer states is ponderings on fates of refugees based in the Mediterranean is a collection of earth, wind, fire and water’s blunt ferocity.
Menacing at intervals, the work employs the use of clashing biscuit tins and thumps across oil barrels; twinning them with wistful whooshes over other items of percussion and thin tremolo on strings to build a scene resembling storms in eighties epic movies. Entrances and exits in and out of bold crescendos by all instruments and murmurs miniscule concede to repetition until both lose their effect; depriving the four movements of the fear they seek to conjure.
Slickness licked its frenzy into shape at Mäkelä’s disguising hands; eliciting slight breezes on the violins unnatural to their bows. Pitch bends and teasing clambers into volume brought to mind a chuffing train reined in by an impending tempest while the winsome woodwind echoed air raid sirens. Ballistic cymbals clashed with boastful bounces but demurred in meditative spins; infringing stereotypes applied to them. Through these vicissitudes the symphony emerged victorious as an assemble of sensations. Navy skies snapped open to bare thunder at the start of movement 2; streetlamp-sprayed raindrops glimmered through strings’ limber lines soon after.
Entangling simultaneous thuds of multiple percussion instruments with sections of col legno gelled inseparably together, Mäkelä caught on to “Kenotaph”’s alluring alleys to display them in full splendour – tendering a rendering that may for long remain unmatched.
But lusciousness was due; imbuements of rubato had been barred from entering the stage. These studs of sorrow came in Mahler’s final and unfinished symphony, the Tenth. Outlasted by its master’s anguish, it exposes an attempt to latch on to melodic reason in the form of perfect cadences doomed to dissolve in dissonance’s clutches. Mäkelä took Mahler’s languishingly sombre strings along elastically spaced motifs; at times surrendering their shape to soulful staggers.
Dismally they mellowed into solemner mellifluousness; limping their way out of hope and shedding tearful tremolos. Anointments of contrasting tones were heard across the violins: no disarray but an intended allocation to create a novel whole. Its outcome was a composition of evolving and devolving timbres; idiosyncratic sounds at play in harmony.
In every iteration of a stave Klaus Mäkelä presented an inspection of the notes pristine: a sterling scrutiny that hinted often at these pieces’ ripeness; musical interpretation’s endless room for growth.
Contrary to times that treasured strictures, this conductor’s baton knows no limits.
Ludicrous imagery shrouds meaningful criticism. Overwriting clouds clarity. Not pleasant reading.