Eerie Spaces Where Elegance and Brutality Collide

Earnestness with an ever-present spark of violence.

Wolfgang Rihm, now nearing 50, has taken up the solemn mission that sent the last century off on its exploratory musical searches. Yet when Mr. Rihm talks about music, it is not systems and sciences that interest him but the healing powers of intuition. What listeners intuit—and they had a chance to do so at the Miller Theater on Saturday night—might be an earnestness of purpose, a carefully constructed density of thought and a fascination with the territory between song and speech. The Ensemble Sospeso, gracefully led by Jeffrey Milarsky, offered the brief instrumental triptych Pol—Kolchis—Nucleus and two vocal pieces: O Notte after a Michelangelo poem, and The Farewell Songs to texts by Wolf Wondratschek.

A certain spark of violence is never far beneath the surface of these pieces. It comes in sudden, emphatic stabs and reaches an unsettling pitch of intensity at moments. Mr. Rihm’s instrumental forces are small here, but he reinforces his aggressiveness with extreme and sometimes ear-shattering highs and lows. Another clue, perhaps, is the composer’s attraction to the Wondratschek poems and their graphic fusions of heartbreak and ugliness. If an overall technique ran through Saturday’s concert, it was the composer’s reliance on fragments: ideas in short bursts that collide, overlap or fit together in order to form larger, flowing musical sentences.

A wide discrepancy in method separates the two voice settings. O Notte, nicely sung by Andre Solomon-Glover, is pure music: a construction of subdued legato phrases supported by rising stepwise figures in the instrumental parts. The Farewell Songs, in a virtuoso performance by Lucy Shelton, gasps, spits, hisses and rants but also indulges in opera-singer rhetoric and a traditional if distorted Viennese waltz.

Mr. Rihm has the faculty of being elegant and brutal simultaneously, and indeed, postwar Germany seems somehow to have sublimated into its music the unpleasant public qualities of the society that came before it. One feels a predilection for the dark and the deathly serious, and the fascination for things grotesque and sometimes cruel. If such is to your taste, Mr. Rihm is a first-rate example to be explored.  

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