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This 2-SACD set will play on any SACD or Standard CD Player.
The sonic architecture of the Apocalypse
We imagine apocalypses as coming upon us unawares, loudly and brutally. The unleashed elements bludgeon, incinerate and scatter everything they encounter, and people scream in naked fear.
Mark Andre’s apocalypse contradicts this image. For the most part it takes place softly, with many zones of silence. Its few loud moments stand out all the more. Softness knows many degrees of intensity, not only in dynamic level, but especially in the tension it builds up between notes and sounds.
As in much of his chamber music, Mark Andre’s “Music-Theatrical Passion” is dominated by dark instrumental colours. The string family is represented by cellos and double basses, the woodwinds by bassoons and bass clarinets, the brass by trombones. Only the human voices stay in the high register. Owing to their range of overtones, low instruments are especially well-suited for electronic manipulation in real time. To transpose instrumental sounds into the tonal and performance space, Andre has developed a special software program in conjunction with the Freiburg Experimentalstudio.
He has quotations from the Bible fed in at the very opening and increases their number roughly from the middle of the piece on. They are taken from John’s Gospel and the Book of Revelation, and more often than not they are whispered. In performance they are emitted by loudspeakers, and although the electronically manipulated sounds are introduced over the same speakers, they sound like irradiation from another universe compared to the four groups of instrumentalists and singers. The voices mainly articulate two vowels – A and O – in many different ways, transforming and concentrating what the words contain. The same applies to the phonetic and semantic levels of language.
Ciphers, signs, similes
The title of Mark Andre’s Passion, …22,13…, likewise relates to a passage from the Bible. Verse 13 of the last chapter in its final book reads, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last”. Then come eight more verses, after which the Holy Writ of the Christian faith ends with a vision of our temporal universe transformed into a world without time. Verse 13 reveals the code of this transformation, the eradication of time by the one who speaks: Christ. Andre adopts this threefold appellation of Eternity for the large-scale design of his piece, whose three sections are titled …O(mega)…, …the last… and …the end…. The titles signify, in metaphysical terms, the direction in which we are headed, not the origins from which we come.
Revelation 23:13 gathers together what had begun in chapter 8 of John’s book: “And when the Lamb (Christ) had opened the seventh seal …”. This seal is the final lock on a secret book containing the history of the world. The final section behind the last seal conjures up, in expressive and symbolic imagery, visions of horror and disaster announcing the end of time.
The Seventh Seal is also the title that Ingmar Bergman gave to a film in which a Crusader named Block returns to his Swedish homeland in the midst of a plague epidemic and wages his life in a game of chess with Death. Andre has known this film since his youth, and it has held him spellbound from the very beginning. His decision to have several interpolated Biblical quotations spoken in Swedish is a nod to Bergman. Another is the fact that he chose a game of chess to serve as a time grid for his composition.
In 1996 the world champion Garry Kasparov played six games of chess against an IBM computer and won them all. In the rematch of May 1997 he faced a more advanced version of “Deep Blue”. After one victory, one defeat and three draws, he lost the decisive sixth game spectacularly on the 19th move. The results prompted heated discussions about the interaction and mutual domination between humans and machines.
Andre takes up the experience of the crucial scenes in this match. In the opening section, …O(mega)…, the music precisely reconstructs and mirrors the passage of time in the final stages of the sixth game. The progress of the piece is determined by the lapses of time between moves – those silent, though not motionless periods of thought which became increasingly long on Kasparov’s part toward the end of the rematch, but shorter and more concise on the part of “Deep Blue”. They seem almost like pauses between jabs and uppercuts – the sometimes reverberant pulse; the rapid figures which overlap, supplant and in one passage truly chase each other; and silence, whose borderline often seems to function like a hidden magnet for the musical events, devouring the audible sounds.
The second game of the 1997 tournament – Kasparov’s first defeat – governs the progress of time in the second piece and part of the third. In this section all four groups of musicians participate in the space from the outset. Here the Passion is reflected in the dual sense of the term: suffering and obsession. Musical and textual elements increasingly intermingle.
The Apocalypse as structure and present time
In the third section the temporal pattern of the chess games is overlaid and supplanted by the architectural principle of the Apocalypse. The composer has presented his thoughts in seven stages, with each new stage emerging from its predecessor. In …the end… Andre interpolates passages relating to the Seven Angels of the Apocalypse. After the final sequence the music comes to a stop. The loudspeakers emit a montage that the composer calls a “Phantomzug”. The term has several layers of meaning. With regard to form, this element is the Zug (move) with which the “phantom Deep Blue” defeats Kasparov – or, transferred to Bergman’s film, the move with which the “phantom” Death seals the doom of the Crusader. But “Phantomzug” also refers to a harrowing event in the Holocaust.
On 30 June 1944 the final 400 prisoners were deported from the Le Vernet concentration camp in France, where mainly Jews had been interned since 1942. First they were taken to Bordeaux, where they were then crammed into a train destined for Dachau. On 28 August the “phantom train” arrived in Bavaria with 291 prisoners aboard. For 57 apocalyptic days the internees were transported in cattle wagons under the burning summer sun. Here Andre’s music comes close to the apocalypse of our own history. At times it takes on almost realistic traits – in sounds resembling the screeching and squealing brakes of trains coming to a stop. They form the culmination of the fierce hammerblows and outbursts that proliferate in the third section of …22,13….
Thereafter all that remains of the lines and sounds are ghostlike scraps, allusions to ‘asthmatic’ breathing, sounds caused by brushing across the strings. Even the electronic manipulation produces nothing more than a shadowy and deathly realm of notes, music of asphyxiating pallor. Mark Andre presses forward into the danger zones of modern human existence from an artistic urge, using the means of metaphysical reflection. He once referred to his Music-Theatrical Passion as a “near-death experiment”. Tabakuk Traber
Translation from the German: J. Bradford Robinson |
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ARTISTS
Vocalconsort Berlin; Work-In-Progress-Berlin, Gerhardt Muller-Goldboom (conductor); Experimentalstudio des SWR |
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