An atmosphere of sadness, anger and uncertainty dominated this year's Donaueschinger Musiktage. The passing in November 2014 of Armin Köhler, the artistic driving force behind the festival for the last 23 years, has left a hole that will be hard to fill. Meanwhile, due to state budget cuts Donaueschingen's orchestra-in-residence, the SWR Sinfonieorchester Freiburg und Baden-Baden, paid what will almost certainly be their final visit. Musically, however, it was business as usual, with the programme featuring a wide variety of world premieres, several of works that will certainly be heard many times again, alongside much experimentation of varying interest and executional success.
An octet of trombones set the microtonal ball rolling, an idiomatic outlet for Georg Friedrich Haas's particular brand of spectralism. With a cantus firmus for support, Haas's Oktett für 8 Posaunen (2015) created an effective dialogue between melodic and harmonic consonance and dissonance, but disappointingly settled on rather mono-dimensional usages of texture, metre and timbre. The opening orchestral concert that followed, under Peter Eötvös, similarly demonstrated a variety of musical paradigms with little deeper development. Johannes Kreidler's TTI (2015) for orchestra and electronics blended ‘de-humanised’ piano playback with a rather lethargic orchestration, and although Richard Ayres's parody No. 48 (2015) amused the audience with Ealing Comedy sound effects, anything more profound was obscured by over-repetition. Yoav Pasovsky panned between orchestral groups in his post-Reichian Pulsus alternans (2015), whilst Johannes Boris Borowski's Sérac (2014/15) provided a welcome breadth of energy and rhythm, though without pushing any post-Lutosławskian stylistic boundaries.
The following morning began with body scanners and guard dogs, a meta-artistic introduction to the latest project from Ensemble Nadar, ‘WYSI(N)WYG’. The ensemble opened with Mirror Box Extensions (2014/15), a new work by their colleague and co-artistic director, Stefan Prins. Impressive episodes of violence and virtual reality are now expected from the composer of Generation Kill (2012), but intimate musical gestures and extreme close-ups created a more refined sense of nervousness and confrontation than was evident three years ago. Prins's didactic digital performance art is increasingly well integrated into the performance experience as a whole: as one of 15 or so pre-selected but incognito tablet performers, I myself felt the wrath (psychologically, verbally and occasionally physically) of my fellow audience members as I had to play them a video or take pictures of events on stage. As so often, Prins was paired with Michael Beil. In Beil's latest musical/theatrical work, Bluff (2015), highly mannered physical theatre was astutely combined with spoken word and live video playback by choreographer Thierry Bruehl in a style reminiscent of Film Noir, and the musical content was also highly refined, if somewhat over-extended.
Ensemble mosaik's concert began promisingly with Mark Barden's aMass (2015) for amplified ensemble, in which a gradual build-up of increasingly distorted sounds climaxed with a playful, short and sweet coda, giving the work a refreshing sense of balance and brevity. Conceptualism, however, was to dominate the rest of the performance in an all-too familiar way. Each composer went looking for their niche: Luís Antunes Pena brought out the megaphones once more for voμáϛ (nomás) (2015); Stephan Winkler tried combining semi-theatrical spatialized instrumentalists with video projection in Überraschung (2015); Orm Finnendahl created 32 ‘self-playing machines’ for AST (2015); and three brief interludes from Carlos Sandoval entitled AntiLegos (2015) formed day-in-the-life duets between man and video. As in previous years, however, I was left with the impression that regrettably little memorable music had been produced as a result of these efforts, despite some excellent ensemble playing under Enno Poppe.
Across town was the first iteration of a ‘Theorieoper’: Freiheit – die eutopische Gesellschaft (2015), the latest blend of performance, concert and discussion space from Patrick Frank. Essentially a thought exercise exploring the concept of freedom in society, a mixture of new and pre-existing compositions, theatrical recitations and surreal operatic ‘happenings’ all combined to make an immersive four-and-a-half-hour-long show. Philosophical debate was central (different guest speakers are invited to give a lecture at each performance, notably Slavoj Žižek in Zürich in spring 2016), but as a result the musical content was often left to play a supporting role. This resulted in some unintentionally bizarre overlaps, such as when a talk on the concept of ‘Eutopia’ (the era of so-called European socio-political freedom between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11) was interrupted by several giant, yellow space monsters courtesy of the latest episode of Trond Reinholdtsen's The Norwegian Opra (2009–). A somewhat over-amplified SWR2 NOWJazz Session later that evening from saxophonist Lotte Anker and friends occasionally strayed towards self-indulgence but included many virtuosic free improvised performances, particularly from vocalist Sofia Jernberg.
Le Encantadas o le avventure nel mare delle meraviglie (2015) by Olga Neuwirth was presented the following morning by Ensemble intercontemporain and Matthias Pintscher. Attempting to create a post-Prometeo poly-stylistic opera is certainly noble in intent, but the attempt to do so much in 75 minutes made it hard to find a coherent message. Between various homages to Nono, a series of robotic Google questions, a synth-pop ballad and much more besides, the work often felt it needed to go somewhere new, yet the material lacked adequate space to breathe.
The final orchestral concert, with François-Xavier Roth, also displayed an abundance of ideas with little connecting tissue. Yves Chauris dispersed his percussionists throughout the hall in Why so quiet (2015) with predictable results, and fun moments were dotted throughout Francesco Filidei's Killing Bach (2015), but the frying pans, Tasers, gunshots, balloons, mobile phones, aerosols, streamers, power drills, kazoos, glasses, plates, bubble wrap and bird calls combined to undermine anything deeper. Alvin Curran's The Book of Beginnings (2015) for orchestra, youth orchestra, two self-playing pianos and smartphone app attempted to memorialise both the death of Köhler and the SWR orchestra through ritualistic violence and sheer dynamic power but was lacking any musical (or theatrical) foundations, as was reflected in some booing, after the final basketballs had been bounced.
To close the concert, and indeed the festival, was Mark Andre's über, for clarinet, orchestra and electronics, and immediately a sense of reverence materialised that the weekend had been lacking. Silence gradually evolved from air sounds into harmonics, multiphonics and orchestral murmurs without a single gratuitous effect, as a tightly controlled atmosphere of suspense was created and electronically enhanced with great subtlety. Jörg Widmann's total musical and technical control was blended perfectly with the orchestra as a primus inter pares, whilst a clear sense of structure gave the whole work shape; this was a welcome example of a new work that justified its half-hour length by musical content, rather than by the duration specified in its commission. A palpable sense of relief was felt in the hall as Andre was presented with the Orchesterpreis, a fitting end to an era for a festival that must now confront a new and unpredictable world.
An aphorism often shared at new music festivals is that if, after two days or two weeks of world premieres, you come away having heard one outstanding piece of music, it was to be deemed a success. There may be nothing new in this, but the particularly egotistic brand of conceptualism popular amongst many young composers, and the common problem of individual ‘ideas’ being stretched out to fill 25-minute commissions, have been common culprits of recent years. Arguments over this inform much of the current musical discourse, rightly of concern to composers, performers and audiences alike, but before we worry excessively about low expectations or a low yield, we would perhaps be wise to remember Sturgeon's Law: 90 per cent of everything is awful.
