In between the four operas of the “Ring,” a critic traveled to take in world premieres by Jennifer Walshe and Anthony Braxton.It’s not a typical week in Germany when a staging of Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” on the composer’s own turf at the Bayreuth Festival finds itself outdone for world-consuming sadness, rage and the possibility of redemption.But that’s what I experienced recently when I traveled between the four operas of the “Ring” at the festival and the Darmstadt Summer Course, a hotbed of avant-garde works since 1946.On Wednesday in Darmstadt — during a day off between “Siegfried” and “Götterdämmerung” in Bayreuth — Ensemble Nikel backed the Irish experimental singer and composer Jennifer Walshe in the world premiere of the complete song cycle “Minor Characters,” which she co-wrote with Matthew Shlomowitz.The morning after “Minor Characters,” I traveled back to Bayreuth for “Götterdämmerung” as staged (to much polarization) by Valentin Schwarz. Experiencing both back-to-back, I had the feeling that the song cycle had managed to steal the fire of the “Ring” cycle.I had expected “Minor Characters” to have a keyed-up, smash-cut musical aesthetic. Shlomowitz’s “Popular Contexts” series, for piano and “sampler keyboard,” after all, uses snatches of vocal growls, drooping water sources and Ping-Pong volleys, plus piano and beat-work, to create a disorientating, groovy effect; then nervier piano marches, alarming synths and distorted guitar samples.
Popular Contexts / Performed by Mark Knoop by Matthew Shlomowitz / Peter AblingerWalshe’s compositional practice often revolves around her wide range of vocal inflections. Her approach incorporates extended technique experimentalism and free improvisation in addition to composed elements.But also many, many accents. In a 2020 profile, the New Yorker critic Alex Ross celebrated her ability to channel “Irish bard” and “California surfer girl” alike — a style which reaches a high state of refinement on solo Walshe efforts like “All the Many Peopls.”
ALL THE MANY PEOPLS by Jennifer Walshe“Minor Characters” hits a new level of development for Walshe and Shlomowitz. He seems to pull her a bit closer toward more typical song forms; she puts some critical distance between his synths and the way they can seem to self-consciously emulate Muzak. And they put to use, through the piece’s dramatic interrogation of the pleasures and ills of our too-online present, the ferocious chops of Ensemble Nikel — a group made up of a percussionist, guitarist, saxophonist and keyboardist.Walshe’s text moves fast, and the music moves at the speed of thought. One moment, her vocals may seem to be celebrating internet memes — or the “minor characters” who become “main characters” for a day on social media. But before long, she’s chiding the world, or herself, for ignoring weightier matters. The music rockets back and forth between amiable, unhurried rhythms and black-metal blast beasts; between ad-jingle saxophone riffs and free-jazz skronk; between even-keeled, Eddie Van Halen-style finger-tapped motifs on electric guitar and less orderly plumes of distorted noise.She toys with audience expectations, too. Early on, she begins in a confessional mode, relating a #MeToo-style narrative involving a professor luring one of his students down to his basement. But before long, Walshe leaves the audience there, narratively, with no resolution and the professor screaming to no one in particular, in perpetuity.Instead, “Minor Characters” pivots to new fascinations and horrors — an exorcism in a rural country field, reports on a burning planet — as online life tends to do. When Walshe gave wild voice to lines like “they knew, we all knew, and we did nothing about it,” her self-implicating understanding of the climate crisis had a Brünnhilde-like edge — with traces of grace and good humor leavening her grave understanding, similar to Wotan in the “Ring,” of a world order’s undoing by its own designs.Walshe has a wide range of literary inspiration, Wagner included; her contributions to the liner notes for “Peopls” refer to “certain sections from ‘Watt’ by Samuel Beckett,” the rapper KRS-One and “the cast of ‘Lohengrin.’” That Wagnerian citation is no joke. “I don’t do anything ironically,” Walshe said in a brief interview after the performance of “Minor Characters.” “I don’t like any music ironically. But it has to mean something. There has to be something at stake.”“Minor Characters” seems to ask: If everyone is distracted online, following their own taste, how do we solve problems together? Even though the show feels complete, there is no true resolution.It felt more satisfying, even, than the “Götterdämmerung” in Bayreuth. Schwarz’s risky staging seems to run aground in the final opera. He has interesting ideas in the lead-up: making Wotan an even bigger cheater than usual; depicting Fafner’s dragon form as a hospice patient at home, sitting on the hoard of gold as a member of the gerontocracy.And Schwarz offers bleak humor, such as in Mime trying to teach Siegfried fear by introducing him to sex through pornography. But by “Götterdämmerung” none of that seems to have mattered as the opera’s telling sputters in its final moments.Still, there was much fine singing and orchestral playing. The bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny’s Wotan had some of Walshe’s gloriously unhinged energy. In both “Die Walküre” and “Siegfried,” during moments of self-pity, he would crumple to the ground, offering aspirated whimpers; the next moment he would be raging, spurred on by a just as quickly extinguished explosion from the orchestra, led with fire by Pietari Inkinen.And Inkinen’s way with quieter textures provided a ravishing experience of Bayreuth’s fabled acoustics: He and the orchestra produced soft-grained marvel after marvel in the second, contemplative act of “Walküre,” then, as if with whip in hand, he blazed through the final act of that opera and the first act of “Siegfried” with what seemed like one complete surge of momentum.Anthony Braxton, whose new “Thunder Music” system debuted in Darmstadt.Kristof LempIn between those two shows, I traveled to Darmstadt for another world premiere: the debut of American saxophonist-composer Anthony Braxton’s new “Thunder Music” system, which came courtesy of a performance, led by him, of his Composition No. 443.While not strictly dramatic in nature, “Thunder Music” suggested a stagelike feel. In this new category of his compositional practice, individual musicians are responsible for making choices about how to merge their own sound with prerecorded sounds of thunder and nature.At Darmstadt, the musicians in this chamber ensemble — including singers, woodwinds, brasses, an accordion and two double basses — prerecorded a take on No. 443 the day before the concert. Then, at the show, the performers could control the extent to which their own prerecorded material was mixed with thunderstorms or swarms of birds (controlled through an app designed for their phones). Simultaneously, they played Composition No. 443 again — live, this time with the ability to network with other musicians in improvisations, or interpolations of past Braxton pieces.At one point, when the saxophonist James Fei and the trombonist Roland Dahinden collaborated on the theme of Braxton’s Composition No. 131 — in which frenetic riffs are capped with a sashaying figure that seems to wink at listeners — they put a jolt of Braxton’s bebop-tinged catalog into what had been an airy stretch of No. 443.Braxton has in the past declared himself “a complete fool for the music of Richard Wagner” — something that you can sense in operas like “Trillium X,” which I reviewed earlier this month from Prague. But you can also sense Braxton’s affection in the way he encourages musicians to layer his various compositions during the same moment in performance. That bit of No. 131 that cropped up during No. 443? Call it a Braxtonian leitmotif for Charlie Parker. More
