RESMUSICA - A Grand Finale for the Musica 2023 Festival
October 4, 2023, by Guillaume Kosmicki
The final three days of the Musica Festival were brimming with performances illustrating the fertile paths of today’s music and its scenography—a crucial focus in current artistic research. The festival ended on a high note with a day of concerts in Basel, Switzerland.
[Excerpt]
KV 385 is a fascinating orchestral, electroacoustic, and theatrical reinterpretation of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Symphony No. 35 "Haffner," conceived by composer Pierre Jodlowski and stage director Séverine Chavrier. The work was certainly not chosen at random. For Mozart, it was a composition with emotional (Haffner was a close acquaintance from the Salzburg period), political (Mozart addressed him at the moment of his ennoblement, warning him about the implications of this new social status—see the research of musicologist Jean-Marie Jacono), and revolutionary significance (it is one of Mozart’s great symphonies, notable for its form, thematic development, and the richness of its orchestral colors).
The Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra performs in a set evoking a snowy forest, and the music freezes—just as it will repeatedly freeze on the triumphant chords at the start of the symphony and on the various themes of the first movement. With each freeze, a soundtrack plays unsettling footsteps, sounds of war… A cameraman moves through the set, filming musicians or various objects on the ground—empty suitcases, family photographs, a stuffed fox, Mozart’s tomb buried under snow (he never had one). These images are projected on a large screen behind the orchestra, filtered, blurred, aged—layer by layer—as the symphony’s themes are played, isolated, dissected. The atmosphere is quite somber, evoking a ruined world, a cataclysm, a hasty departure, a deportation, vanished memories…
The other movements of the symphony are referenced less directly, as though dissolving into the strata of memory, while the interplay between the orchestra and soundtrack becomes increasingly intense, diverging from the classical piece. For instance, across twenty modules, a robotic voice gives instructions to the orchestra, which obeys—offering, in effect, practical methods for composing and performing contemporary music: clusters, glissandi, aggregates, dynamics, timbre experiments, fluctuations... In some modules, the symphony is still evoked—for example, through a list of perfect chords ending in a thunderous D major: “And the winner is D major!” Several episodes punctuate the performance. The audience is alternately dazzled or plunged into total darkness, only to discover, when the lights return, that the entire orchestra, including conductor Jean Deroyer, has fallen asleep. At the end, over a long series of interrupted theme introductions—punctuated by an obsessive “One… Two… Three… Four…” and interwoven with Ravel’s Bolero, Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, or an electric guitar chord—the black stage drapes are removed, revealing bare brick walls. The illusion is shattered. The symphony recedes into our memories—or perhaps into oblivion—and many questions remain: What is interpretation? What is the concert ritual? What does a “hit” from the repertoire mean today? What can a classical symphony tell us now? Can we still play Mozart in 2023? Brilliant!
OuMuPo online - by Mathias Daval
oct. 2023
The Musica Festival is known for its unconventional offerings. At the TNS (Théâtre National de Strasbourg), the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Jean Deroyer, invites audiences to a staged performance of Mozart’s 35th Symphony: a hybrid and playful creation by Séverine Chavrier and Pierre Jodlowski, who seem to have taken on a challenge straight out of the Ouvroir de musique potentielle (Workshop of Potential Music).
Among Mozart’s many Viennese patrons, Sigmund Haffner Sr. and Jr. occupied a central place in the late 1770s and early 1780s. In the case of KV 385, it was Leopold Mozart who, as often, acted as impresario, urging his son to fulfill a new commission (some might see this as a cunning ploy to delay his son’s marriage to Constanze Weber, which he disapproved of). Wolfgang initially composed the piece as a serenade, which later evolved into the 35th Symphony. Now known as the “Haffner,” it celebrates an ennoblement and, regardless of interpretation, leaves no doubt as to its exalted and ceremonial nature—Mozart himself advised it be played “with great fire.”
Deliberately avoiding any historical or musicological contextualization, KV 385 chooses instead to dismantle the apparent univocity of the Haffner Symphony. After a fragmented introductory theme, punctuated by camera zooms on the orchestra, the work morphs into raw sonic material suited to the visual and noise-based experimentation of Pierre Jodlowski—ever eager to fuse image and sound. Completely stripped of narrative, KV 385 becomes the subtext for a hallucinatory exploration, its title not just an archival reference but also a kind of digital filing label.
At the heart of the performance are extravagant "modules" driven by an AI voice, which instructs the musicians to perform a series of constrained sequences à la OuMuPo (Ouvroir de musique potentielle). For example: a ten-second sequence of piano-to-forte crescendos, orchestra applause, an AI vocal solo, semi-random chord choices—one hilariously clarifying, in case there was any doubt, that the piece is in D major—or even a simple silence, which is, of course, still Mozart.
This approach of creatively deconstructing a work largely bypasses the explicit showcasing of the compositional genius behind this “symphonic sonata”—from the minor-key modulations in the development to the frenzied intensity of the final presto, here fragmented with 4/4 countdowns and an underlying bolero rhythm. Disappointed ears may turn back to recordings by George Szell with the Cleveland Orchestra (Szell, incidentally, had a stint with the Strasbourg Philharmonic in his youth—closing the loop).
But Jodlowski’s ephemeral electroacoustic fragments, staged by Chavrier, reveal the multidimensionality of Mozart’s music and, above all, through sonic re-encoding rather than distortion, highlight its jubilant playfulness—like in the delightful moment when the musicians reprise the theme a cappella.
