Håkon Austbø
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is one of the great treasures of Washington's arts scene, a federal museum with the guts to undertake strange and current exhibitions, along with adventurous musical programs to accompany them. So it should be no surprise that DCist was at the Hirshhorn yesterday to hear what was sure to be an excellent and interesting concert by the Norwegian pianist Håkon Austbø. With a name spelled like that, how could this event not be fun? Throw in the fact that the program was devoted to music by Alexander Scriabin and Olivier Messiaen, two composers influenced by the phenomenon of synesthesia, or color hearing, and that sealed the deal.
This concert was the final event connected to an interesting summer exhibit at the Hirshhorn, Visual Music, which closed on Sunday. In July, we reviewed a concert by the 21st Century Consort on the same theme, which was arranged near the opening of the exhibit. The art in the show is about translating music into color, and the two concerts featured composers interested in how to render color as music. Håkon Austbø has just moved back to his native Oslo from Amsterdam, where he led the LUCE Foundation, a group interested in recreating the color/music performances of Alexander Scriabin. He and his colleagues spent several years figuring out how to perform Scriabin's Prométhée, le Poème du Feu, an enigmatic symphony, on the Prometheus legend, with a notated part (Luce) for projected colors.
The most satisfying part of the Meet the Artist discussion that followed the concert was the chance to see a DVD excerpt of one of their performances, in which a musician at a computer controlled the appearance and disappearance of color patterns on five hanging screens behind an orchestra. Before his death, Scriabin was only able to complete sketches for an even grander work, Mysterium, a multiple-day rite of color and music to be performed in a specially constructed temple. Scriabin, as they say, was out there. Some institution in Washington (the Hirshhorn, the Corcoran, the Kreeger, the Kennedy Center?) needs to bring Austbø and his group to perform these recreated light symphonies here in Washington.
After a few words by Kerry Brougher, the exhibition's curator, the Ambassador of Norway to the United States, Knut Vollebaek, introduced the performer and the Embassy's involvement in the concert, as part of this fall's Centennial Celebration of the foundation of the modern state of Norway, which declared its independence from Sweden in 1905. Håkon Austbø, an unprepossessing spindle of a man, crouched at the Hirshhorn's Steinway and proceeded to give a rather blinding and ecstatic rendition of two of the Scriabin piano sonatas. The seventh sonata, op. 64 (the so-called "White Mass") from 1912, was a martellato shocker with a few tender moments. The much more mysterious tenth sonata, op. 70 (the "Trill"), followed with its melancholy descending theme and the furious trills that supposedly represent the humming of insects or the singing of birds.
We had the good fortune to hear veteran pianist Ruth Laredo play the "Trill" sonata last year at the National Gallery of Art. Laredo, who died this past May, was perhaps the foremost living interpreter of Scriabin's piano music, and judging by Austbø's performance, we think he would be in the running to replace her, with Alex Lubimov, Ivo Pogorelich, and a few others.
French composer Olivier Messiaen actually experienced clinical synesthesia, seeing colors in his mind when he heard chords and scales. As Austbø explained in greater detail after the concert, the composer made a catalogue of the modes and harmonies he had invented and the increasingly complex color patterns to which they corresponded. As a representative example of Messiaen's color theories, we heard two pieces from the haunting, otherworldly Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jésus (Twenty perspectives on the child Jesus). Not only would the angelic shrieking of the wildly ecstatic "Noël" have awakened Baby Jesus, it would also have deafened him permanently. The blackbird excerpt ("La Bouscarle") of the Catalogue d'oiseaux (Catalogue of birds) was a gorgeous conclusion to this magnificent concert at the Hirshhorn.