The Brooklyn Rail

The Moers Festival may well be one of the globe’s most anarchic, weirdness-drenched, chaos-driven music weekenders, continually reshaping itself to refresh creativity, and to unhinge its loyal acolyte attendees. Fortunately, the organizers maintain a high degree of time-control and logistic deftness, to facilitate the exterior appearance of random improvisation, crazed happenstance, and all-are-welcome sonics. Originally devoted to free jazz at its 1972 genesis, the festival has steadily mushroomed ears to invite non-jazz performance into the Whitsun weekend arena. Now, more than ever, there is a pronounced presence for out-there, moderne sounds, whether acoustic or electronic, solo or orchestral, old (perhaps the 1950s) or new (perhaps right now, as scored modules are spontaneously arranged).

Besides harboring very recent works, the festival characteristically features retrospective celebrations, with clusters of such performances running through its five days. In the name of change, Moers has added an extra day to its accustomed old four, and most crucially, moved back into the city center (from its park-side place), recalling the old 1970s when the stage was close to the castle. Now the main outdoor stage squats right in the central Moers square, surrounded by victual stalls and trucks. Many satellite venues are used, both indoor and outdoor, but they mostly lie within the bounds of a five minute amble.

In this year of his centenary, Morton Feldman was strongly represented, particularly on the Sunday. There was also a co-running György Kurtág focus. These multiple gigs presented compositions from across the lifetimes of these composers. With Feldman, there was an extremely perverse strategy of presenting three concerts simultaneously, each at 11:55 p.m. Your scribe can imagine no earthly reason why this was the case. Two of the Feldman works happened in churches, at different corners of the square. The third had violinists Ronja Sophie Putz and Myrsini Bekakou improvising around For Aaron Copland in the castle park grounds. The Saint Josef church hosted Piano And String Quartet, while the Stadtkirche presented Crippled Symmetry from 1983. It was this latter that your scribe selected for his midnight meditation, with its unusual line-up of piano, vibraphone, and flute/bass flute. This has a variable duration of around ninety minutes. In many ways it’s reminiscent of Feldman’s Why Patterns?, an extended experience penned in 1978, and heard to bewitching effect (in the middle of the night) at Ostrava Days in the Czech Republic in 2021.

Stadtkirche is painted white, with large arched windows, pillars, balconies to each side, and movable wooden chairs rather than pews. A large metal chandelier dominates. The audience is select in numbers, and destined to lose around a third during the performance. Considering the gently uncurling music of Feldman, the mere three instruments sound peculiarly dense amidst the reverberant qualities of the church, with its very high rafters. There is much detailed activity, but paradoxically, a sense of undisturbed calm. Repeats resound, eaten by echo, overlaps made in the listener’s mind (and possibly external reality), rewarded by the rich sound of the bass flute during its repeated alternations with its smaller sibling. The swaps happen quite quickly. Around halfway in, there is an almost perceptible gear-shift, a soft shunt into another phase, something which subsequently happens with increasing (slow) regularity. The piano wanders lower, the vibraphone clouding, suspended, and becoming strangely changeable. There is a solitary doom-piano instance, a fibrillating flute, a growing vibraphone rhythm. Unfortunately, it is now after 1 a.m., and this music has a tendency to lull the consumer. Would the bright afternoon have provided a preferable setting, or did Feldman prefer this composition to inhabit the deep night?

Your scribe will never know what went down in Saint Josef’s, where the Chroma Kollektiv interpreted the piece that was commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, being one of Feldman’s key compositions (and recordings). He wonders whether that might have been a wiser, superior decision, enfolding though Crippled Symmetry was.

There were some earlier evening Feldman works that provided different challenges. The Moers Festival has a marked love of extreme volume and strength variations, as the Indonesian onslaught duo of Senyawa combined ultra-amplified bamboo/string armageddon and hyper-distorted two-microphone vocals on the main stage. Lacking much time to calm themselves, the audience remained for some Feldman, as Two Pieces For Cello And Piano were played from a hydraulic platform, hoisted into the air above. The crowd was remarkably attentive, swiftly re-calibrating post-Senyawa, but there were still stray sounds from the streets beyond: a pooch-in-pain, a yelled human exchange. Pauses were sometimes profound. Was this courage or folly, on this pre-holiday night?

Soon, on the main stage itself, Rothko Chapel shimmered even closer to silence. The interpreting ensemble was quite large, and severely underused, with just violin, bells and soft glimmer vibraphone to the fore, for most of the thirty minute duration. Rivulet piano entered later, but here outside, there were perhaps sonic details that eluded the ears.

Kurtág (still alive to enjoy his own centenary) now dwells in one of the rooms at the Budapest Music Center, a glorious multi-faceted venue that was founded by trombonist László Gőz, who appeared here at Moers with his Moment’s Notice Trio. This was another form of environmental music, improvised, and employing a combination of electronic and acoustic instruments. Gőz brought along his bass trumpet, and György Kurtág Jr. had keyboards and mixer-modules. Ancient days were represented by Hungary’s national instrument, the cimbalom, as played by Miklós Lukács. Cosmic swirling was broken by juddering cycles, as wooden flute and flugelhorn were added. The cimbalom sparsely shivered, racing away in a shower of activity. This could have been one of Bill Laswell’s lost Miles Davis mixes. Once again, the mid-afternoon audience were preternaturally hushed, concentrating and open-minded. Occasionally some gabbling wretch would soil another set, but such outbursts were thankfully scarce.

For those who enjoy time in churches, it was back to Saint Josef for a premiere show from NYC’s own Yarn/Wire foursome, commissioners of compositions for their two-pianist/two-percussionist roster. Here we had new pieces by Jonah Haven and Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir, works that nestled very well together, to be loosely described as drone-texture based. For the Haven composition, we were back to extreme sparseness, the percussionists working on their metal water flasks, bowing at attached extensions, or plipped by small mallets. Faint pianos haunted the environs, one of them prepared. The more impressive Supraseether worked within similar territory, but more aroused, with massive kettle drums drag-scraped, and the strings of one piano also rubbed harshly. It was a very subtle development, although growing in assured strength, the percussion skin-rubs eventually sounding like fighter planes above, gongs going to siren level, howls and groans along with the smaller drums deployed by the pianists. Tin whistles and bird-callers made a late appearance. This was still a form of drone music, though not typical of the form.

For new music, the Moers Festival had a new ensemble. Gellért Szabó’s Ideal Orchester made a profound mark, nay, rend in the program, performing each day in an extreme residency situation. They inhabited a far opposition position, only occasionally crafting quiet music, but largely hitting the peaks of maximalist combination, with their well-chosen line-up of violins, cello, accordion, trombones, saxophones, bass clarinets, tuba, organ, bass, drums, and a six-piece vocal wing who refused to operate within acknowledged new music parameters. Each of them had more of a theatrically individual sense of being, both vocally and in their bodily gestures. This staggering crew from Leipzig are poised to be discovered beyond Germany, headed by a conductor who is also an intense, tension-prompting presence, clad like a harassed businessman, tie tied tight in this heatwave cityscape.

The sets were mixed between shorter interventions (some set up on the hydraulic gantries) and longer, epic confrontations that neared an hour in length. One was given in Saint Josef, but the most stunning work arrived on the penultimate evening, outdoors on the main stage. Der Moderne Mensch und der Heilige Berg was commissioned by the Moers Festival (along with all the other pieces), and clearly involved Szabó spontaneously prompting the orchestra with secret signals, driving them in hard sonic battalions. Few antecedents were visible, and divisions between jazz, folk, and moderne were smudged, as if we cared about such things this far into the festival. Climactic from the beginning, the rousing spirals rarely paused, as the energized Szabó manically directed, as if his very existence was at risk, stalking and pacing around the stage, looking strained and disturbed. Near the end, a mini-choir pre-shot video sprang up on the festival’s huge, dangling cellphone-shaped screen, shot in bright white light, like the fifth-coming, flung into the future. By this time Szabó was shouting in frustration, still pacing uncontrollably, until he leapt off the stage and strode away to the edges, either disgusted, satisfied, trapped, or escaping. Any of these, anyway—he still returned to the stage for a sonic absorption of the almost endless audience apeshit applause. Would Morton have appreciated this turn of events? Your scribe would like to believe so, but harbors strong doubts.