A Form of Exile: Edward Said and Late Style, CLS, Wood, QEH review - baggy ferment of ideas and sounds

You could plan an entire concert season around the theme of “late style”, its paradoxes and variations. For this one-off, many of us expected a concentrated mesh of Edward Said’s only-connect observations with a well-balanced musical programme, something along the lines of the recent 90-minute cloud tapestry the City of London Sinfonia wove with atmospheric scientist Simon Clark (Rachel Halliburton, whom I accompanied, loved it, as did I).

That was to underestimate the latest collaboration with the London Review of Books, involving four very fine actors voicing not just Said’s chosen literary comparisons but a host of further writers, three world-class soloists and conductor – all women, making up for the contrived apologies for their absence in the Said dialectic – and what ended up as a substantial chamber orchestra. No-one quite expected the apparently under-rehearsed whole to run to three hours with interval. The trouble was that the LRB felt obliged to promote other authors including Nicholas Spice, Charles Simic, Colm Tóibín, Marina Warner and Michael Wood.

As we plunged into the verbal side of Part One (“Beethoven, Adorno and late style as catastrophe”), it wasn’t always easy to work out who was taking on the role of whom. Juliet Stevenson kicked off with her usual aplomb, and we knew we were with Sylvia Plath and her Little Fugue in the reading of young Aliyah Odoffin, a revelation to me, but between Will Self and Khalid Abdalla – last seen taking on the role created by Simon McBurney in the revival of Complicité class Mnemonic – when was it Adorno speaking and when Said?

This became a vital matter in Part Two (“Lampedusa, Strauss and late style as anachronism"), since while the great Sicilian writer had full homage, we got the usual accusations against the old Strauss, shielded from a disintegrating world in his Garmisch villa, and observations which had me whispering “crap” and "wrong" to my neighbour. No, Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne auf Naxos are neither “late style” nor a regression from the musical language of Elektra (parts of Rosenkavalier, when the subject-matter demands it, are just as dissonant as Elektra, even given an element of self-parody). A note in the programme did at least allow me to lay an injustice at Said’s door; he’s quoted describing Strauss as retreating in his so-called “Indian summer” works of the 1940s into a “sugary, relatively regressive tonal, and intellectually tame world”. The ensuing performance of the Duett Concertino for clarinet, bassoon, strings and harp gave the lie to this. Why should a composer always cave in to Adorno’s demand for a reflection of the times (Strauss actually made his own impassioned statement in Metamorphosen, nowhere mentioned here)? Isn’t timeless beauty, when matched to infinite subtlety and a sincere statement of “this is who I am”, enough? Don’t we need this more, right now, than tragic laments, or at least as much as them? The four actors, sitting at the side, smiled as much as we did at the impersonations of bear (or Beast) and princess (or Beauty) by consummate bassoonist Ursula Leveaux and CLS principal clarinet Katherine Spencer (pictured above with Jackson and the CLS), deliciously vocal in the cadenza-ette between second and third movements. Tears in the eyes and laughter on the lips are all that we could ask for from the octogenarian Strauss, paralleling Verdi at the time of Falstaff. Questions about the man and his time are silenced while the music lasts.

About Beethoven’s fissures and restlessness in his final works there could be no doubt in the Gross Fuge (in the late quartets, there’s serene tradition, too, but that doesn’t fit Adorno’s brief). Trouble is, it’s hard enough for string quartet but killing for an ensemble; it needs months of preparation, and the Queen Elizabeth Hall’s unsympathetic acoustics exposed stray hairs in the playing and a lack of to-hell-with-it characterisation under otherwise excellent conductor Tess Jackson; the physiognomy of old Beethoven did not emerge here. Musically, the second half was on the level of the Duett-Concertino. Brass who would be needed in Strauss’s Second Horn Concerto fanfared us solemnly with Purcell’s March and Canzona from his Funeral Music for Queen Mary. Keen was wrong to brush this off as a mere prelude without explanation (Purcell died at the age of 35 a year after composing his monarch’s obsequies). Said’s parallels between Cavafy’s Alexandria – if he could be allowed pure aestheticism, why not Strauss? – and Britten’s Venice were astute, though we might have done without Tóibín’s rather prosaic writing about being in a Serenissima stripped of tourists in late 2020. Alexandra Wood, Colette Overdijk, Clare Finnimore and Joely Koos hypnotised us with the passacaglia rockings of Britten’s Third Quartet after the tortured reminiscences of his Death in Venice.

The verbal coda, on Said, Genet and late style as a form of exile, was over-extended as we headed to the two-and-a-half-hour mark. Very topical, of course, the idea of late works created in a kind of exile leading us to what keeps looking like the end of days for Said's fellow Palestinians (I didn't know about Genet's identification with them).

Maybe repetitions of previous phrases was a good dramatic device, and Strauss’s “I don’t like the semi-darkness; I love the light” as said to his biographer Willi Schuh in London in 1947 set us up for the final work, but we were tired by then and some of the audience had already left.

The concerto, an old man looking back at the work of his truculent father as principal horn of the Munich Court Orchestra and reflecting the Mozart works he’d been studying, along with the complete works of Goethe, to prove to himself that German civilization had not been destroyed utterly by “those barbarians”, as Strauss called the Nazis, provided the final balm. Amadea Dazeley-Gaist, newly graduated from the Royal College of Music, wove as gorgeous a horn tone as any I’ve heard; the visible expression of the humour in the work will come with time.

Immense riches, then, to be going on with, and much to read, but next time, may the planning be more careful and the orchestral rehearsal time not compromised. Curiously, and maddeningly, a concert of Boulez, about whose late scores much could be said – a quartet found one of them impossible to play and the composer rewrote it with them in attendance – and Cage was taking place next door at the Purcell Room. I'd love to have heard that; it started at 7, an hour later than the CLS concert, and finished at nearly the same time. That's the London concert scene for you.

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