Lachen verlernt (2002)

Josefowicz is a player of exceptional quality, and her performance of Esa-Pekka Salonen's Laughing Unlearnt for solo violin was a revelation. She plays with such intelligence that this unfamiliar work was immediately accessible: its Bach chaconne-like qualities giving the piece a natural narrative drive.

(Lachen Verlernt is)… a kind of chaconne, a series of inventions (studies almost) over a chordal progression that is never heard in its entirety, which gels into a formidable technical showpiece.

...Then, in the middle of that ambitious schedule, Salonen managed to put in an appearance as a composer-in-residence with SummerFest, the chamber music festival in La Jolla, where his latest work was given its world premiere Saturday night.
The piece is "Lachen Verlernt" (Laughing Unlearnt), a 10-minute chaconne for solo violin, written for Cho-Liang Lin, the SummerFest artistic director, and it was included on a program that also saw Salonen conduct his "Five Images After Sappho" and Stravinsky's "A Soldier's Tale," a program to be repeated tonight in Los Angeles at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre.
"Lachen Verlernt" has an unusually unsettled and dark-seeming tone from a composer whose works have tended to be sunnier. Alone, it says something about our times. Put in context of the two populist symphonies--Shostakovich's Second and Beethoven's Ninth--that Salonen conducted at the Hollywood Bowl on Thursday, and the roseate "Sappho" songs and the sardonic fate of Stravinsky's soldier on Saturday, the violin score says quite a bit about music in its time and place.
The title is taken from a line in the song, "Prayer to Pierrot," from Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire." The narrator entreats the harlequin, Pierrot, her "soul's veterinarian," to teach her to laugh again. In a pre-concert talk Saturday, Salonen said the line reflected his own natural unease as an artist to the way the world has changed in the past year. He also felt the concept might be curiously suited to Lin's cheerful personality, which he suspects must have its own darker side.
On first hearing, however, Bach's great Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 for solo violin sounds the obvious influence. In Salonen's case, though, we never hear the repeated series of chords over which the series of variations are made. Each variation, instead, offers just aspects of that chord progression. Instead, the allusions remain just beyond our grasp.
The beginning is sparse, tense, dramatic--long notes sharply cut off with brusque curlicues. What follows is both furious and strangely gorgeous, impressive virtuoso flourishes on open strings, fancy scale work and passages thick with chords. The final, flutey bars are but the hint of laughter regained, just sweet enough to leave a comforting afterglow, especially with Lin's masterful performance evoking the best Bach playing.
Still, the lack of ready optimism proved a striking contrast to Thursday's Bowl program in which Lenin was hailed as the beacon of happiness at struggle's end in Shostakovich's 1927 symphony, and where Beethoven, in his epochal ode to brotherhood a century earlier, offered the quintessential essay in optimism. Just when we let our guard down, Salonen reveals, history is always there to remind us the struggle never ends.