APRIL 28, 2024
BRAHMS, BRITTEN, AND BROWN
You have not yet heard Stacey Brown’s When death takes something from you give it back, and neither have we: the piece is a commission from the Victoria Symphony, and will be premiered in April by the orchestra and mezzo-soprano Mireille Lebel. But a large body of commentary has already accumulated around the text that the Newfoundland-based, Kamloops-born Brown has chosen to set, excerpted from the Danish poet Naja Marie Aidt’s When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back: Carl’s Book.
“Aidt’s memoir is like broken glass, the shattered pieces singular in their form but each glistening, ready to cut,” said Nathan Scott McNamara, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Kirkus Reviews considers Aidt’s book “a stirring, inventive masterpiece of heartbreak.” And the author herself, speaking to World Literature Today’s Kathryn Savage, has been unusually frank about her quest to express her grief and anger over the death of her 25-year-old son, Carl, who leaped from a fifth-floor window while suffering from psilocybin-induced psychosis.
“When you experience a very sudden shock and get extremely traumatized, within minutes it feels like you fall out of the world somehow, fall out of time,” Aidt told Savage. “It feels like time stops, and at the same time is so painful, every minute is pure torture, and as everyone else is still in normal time it is a very lonely feeling. I remember it felt like being excluded from everything I would consider normal before Carl’s death; nothing was normal.
“I remember waking up in the morning and for a second I was unaware of what happened, and then had to face the new reality once again, try to understand it,” she continued. “Much later, the heaviness came. The exhaustion, the depression. The rage would come in waves, being a desperate way to try to cope. There is the deep despair, and there is rage. Sometimes, I just screamed. Sometimes I hated every person I saw in the street, smiling and laughing, carefree and enjoying themselves. Sometimes, I couldn’t cry anymore, and the crying would then turn into anger. The anger is necessary, I think. Anger is powerful, and I remember thinking that if I could get that angry and hate life so much, there was still hope—that I hadn’t lost my power completely.”
With such an elemental source feeding into Brown’s gift for rich and complex orchestration, one can expect an emotional, even transformative concert experience, especially if one is nursing some grief of one’s own. And who isn’t, given the state of the world?
But what else can stand up to a work of such probable power?
For Victoria Symphony music director Christian Kluxen, one option was obvious: Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes. Although written as incidental music for the composer’s powerful and controversial opera Peter Grimes, and expressing some of that work’s concerns in purely orchestral form, they stand remarkably well on their own. Death, anger, and regret all run through this music, along with a sense of the inhuman fury of a raging sea and the consoling beauty of a tranquil one.
Thinking further about the score for Peter Grimes, Kluxen saw a possible link to Johannes Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 in E minor in Britten’s use of passacaglia form in a separate interlude, from Act II. “Britten and [Dmitri] Shostakovich had this small game with each other where they would compete about who could write the most important passacaglia,” he points out. “A passacaglia is a piece where the same bass line or chord structure is repeated throughout the piece. It is the most relentless musical structure; it can make you meditative, or drive you mad. It’s an obsessive thought that won’t leave your mind.”
“The last movement of Brahms 4 is also a passacaglia. At that time, it was maybe the greatest written since Bach. Britten uses it as a dramatic tool to focus the haunting relentlessness that goes through Peter Grimes, which is equally present in the interludes. It would be overkill to include Britten’s passacaglia, though. In this instance, Brahms’s should stand alone.”
Kluxen was also reminded of an anecdote concerning the great 20th-century conductor Carlos Kleiber, the Symphony No. 4, and the very prominent flute solo woven into that work’s fourth movement. “I think it was Kleiber who said to the musicians that this flute solo represents a mother looking into the grave of her child,” Kluxen recalled. “That is just his interpretation, of course.” But given that Kleiber’s 1980 recording of the Symphony No. 4 with the Wiener Philharmoniker is a landmark for many connoisseurs, that interpretation is worth paying attention to.
“This is one of those programs,” Kluxen adds, “where I would say that when you’ve heard it, you’ll understand. Before that, it can be difficult to understand what the connections are, but I would say that they are very, very deep, and very dark.”
Notes by Alex Varty
Christian Kluxen, conductor
Mireille Lebel, mezzo-soprano