Pièce

One of the most extraordinary musical events to have taken place in Vienna in recent years was a “Surprise Concert” arranged by Universal Edition to celebrate the ninetieth birthday of Alfred Schlee. He had joined that highly influential Austrian publishing house in 1927 and, having restructured the company after the war, had been responsible for signing up such distinguished and profitable names as Boulez and Stockhausen in 1953, Berio and Messiaen in 1959 and, as his latest major coup, Arvo Pärt. So the programme presented in the Konzerthaus on 18 November 1991, performed largely by the Arditti Quartet and consisting of specially written pieces by no fewer than thirty-seven different composers, was a tribute of which he was not unworthy.

Messiaen’s homage to Schlee (at just over three minutes one of the longest in the programme) came not only from him but also from a representative of the avian musicians so prominently featured in his scores over the last forty years or so. The central section of Pièce is devoted to a very characteristic transcription of the song of one of the composers favourite birds, the garden warbler - to which he had devoted a whole piano piece,La fauvette des jardins, twenty years earlier. That is why Messiaen required a piano as well as a string quartet. Far from integrating keyboard and strings, however, he keeps them mostly apart, having them alternate their observations in both the middle section and in the outer framwork. The only passage in which they play together is in one of opening exchanges between peremptory strings and visionary piano and at the corresponding point where those exchanges are recalled in reverse order at the end.

Messiaen died less than a year later. Alfred Schlee is still with us.

Gerald Larner©