Barbican Hall
Piano Sonata no.2
Eclat/Multiples
Notations I, VII, IV, III, and II
Pli
selon pliJean-Frédéric Neuburger (piano)
Yeree She (soprano)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Pablo Rus Broseta, Thierry Fischer (conductors)
The BBC’s Total Immersion
series has recently seemed to be running out of steam, offering distinctly
underwhelming, and in some cases downright bizarre, repertoire choices. At
least it did the right thing here, and honoured in the year of his ninetieth
birthday the man who remains not only the single most important Chief Conductor
in the history of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, but the abiding presence in post-war music (as I suppose we may still,
just about, call it). Alas, I was unable to attend the whole day’s events,
which included a pair of films and a lecture by Paul Griffiths, but I managed
to hear two out of the three concerts, having to forego an LSO St Luke’s
performance from the Guildhall New Music Ensemble and David Corkhill (une page d’éphéméride, Anthèmes 1, Mémoriale (‘…expolsante-fixe…’ Originel), Dérive 1, the Sonatine
for flute and piano, and the piano Notations).
The first, lunchtime concert
gave decent enough but slightly disappointing performances of two works: the
Second Piano Sonata and Eclat/Multiples.
When it comes to the former work, I have doubtless been spoilt both by Maurizio
Pollini’s legendary recording and the experience of thrice having heard him
perform it in concert (in Salzburg, Berlin,
and London).
This was, however, unless I have forgotten something (unlikely in this case, I
think), the first time I had heard Eclat/Multiples
‘live’. The Sonata remains of course a monumental challenge to all who approach
it, which is not to say that it is ‘unapproachable’, whatever that might mean.
I stand in admiration for any pianist who can so much as play the notes and
play them relatively convincingly. Those days Boulez long lamented, when new
music suffered so greatly from well-meaning yet, in the pejorative sense,
amateurish performances – a situation that led directly to his taking up
conducting – are long since passed. Jean-Frédéric Neuburger gave a sense of the
piece’s concerns, even, though perhaps only if one knew this already, of its
celebrated ‘destruction’ of the idea of the sonata. But the white heat of
Pollini’s ultra-commitment, his unerring sense and projection of musical drama,
above all his ability not only to maintain a musical line even as the work does
its damnedest to obliterate it: I struggled to discern them. Range of
expression was ultimately somewhat narrow; undoubted virtuosity astonished less
than it should. Above all, Such, perhaps, is the danger attendant to the work’s
transformation from New Music rallying cry into ‘classic’. (Boulez’s persistent
warnings concerning museum culture remain as urgent as ever.) Beethoven, after
all, is destroyed far more by insufficient performances than by Boulez’s
apocalyptic reckoning with the example of the Hammerklavier Sonata.
Eclat/Multiples was conducted by Pablo Rus Broseta, who
had replaced François-Xavier Roth at short notice. Gratitude is in order, then,
and again, to conduct the piece well enough is no mean achievement. However, of
the scintillation that Boulez himself has brought to the work – this was the
orchestra that gave its first performance, conducted by the composer, in 1970
–was not altogether present, the BBC SO at times sounding less razor-sharp than
ideal. Opposition between ‘striated’ and smooth time was present, yet seemed less urgently generative than one might
have hoped for. That said, the sense of losing oneself in time remained quite
remarkable: a presentiment, perhaps, of Dérive
2? Moreover, hearing the opening piano cascade after the sonata brought to
life both what the works have in common and where they differ. Technique and
implications of proliferation are very different in nature, even though but a
single section of Multiples having
been completed, we must still wait to hear the ‘finished’ work. I say ‘even
though’, but the near-endless sense of possibility in serial proliferation is
something to which Boulez has often drawn attention. Tantalisingly, we read in
a 2010
interview for Universal Edition: ‘I would especially like to finish Éclat/Multiples. That’s one of the
works which is almost finished, and, you know, I have practically twice the
length of the work as I play it now, and therefore I would like to finish
because the concept of the end is already there.’ There is much for us to
occupy ourselves with in the meantime, though, not least in the composer’s
post-Debussyan liberation – perhaps in this case, even exaltation – of timbre. (Those
violas, that basset horn! They are emphatically not ‘mere colour’. Klangfarbenmelodie has continued to
develop, to expand its realm of possibilities.) Moreover, as Jonathan Goldman
has written, ‘Form, once thought by serial composers such as the young Boulez
to be equivalent to the exhaustion of the possibilities of the series (a
characteristic of none but a single Boulezian creation, the often-analysed Structures Ia), reveals itself in
Boulez’s later works to be an open-ended affair.’
For the evening concert,
Thierry Fischer was Roth’s replacement. I assume that he must have conducted Notations and Pli selon pli before; they are hardly the sort of works one
conducts for the first time at the drop of a hat. Whatever the truth of that,
these were assured performances. I doubt that anything will ever eclipse the
memory of Boulez’s extraordinary, Bergian performance of Pli selon pli in London four
years ago. But one thing that has struck me recently is the greater willingness
of other conductors to perform his work. Daniel Barenboim has, of course, long
been a champion; I shall soon be reporting from performances in Berlin. Nor is
he alone. However, I wonder whether a perverse consequence of Boulez’s
pre-eminence as a conductor has been either reluctance or inability – Why would
an orchestra hire X to conduct Boulez, when it might enlist the composer
himself? – on the part of other musicians to lead performances of his
orchestral music. Fischer’s performances proved assured, a worthy tribute, and
the BBC SO was on much better form too.
For those who carp about
Boulez’s conducting activities allegedly having taken his attention away from
composition – they generally seem not to like his music very much, so it is not
immediately clear why they should care – the Notations should stand as a rebuke. Boulez himself has owned that
he would have been unable to compose the pieces without the experience of
conducting Wagner and Mahler. With every listening, that claim becomes more and
more unarguable. The virtuosity in orchestral writing is staggering, in its way
as much so as that of Ravel, or indeed Mahler. Such was revealed here in
performance; it is remarkable what a difference inclusion of the Seventh
Notation now makes to the previous first four. As much as Eclat/Multiples, one hears Boulez as, amongst many other things, a
true heir to the Viennese purveyors of Klangfarbenmelodie,
Schoenberg as much as Webern. This was perhaps the most ‘Romantic’ reading, not
only of that movement, but of the work-in-progress as a whole, I have yet to
hear. Mahler, perhaps reimagined by the Schoenberg of op.19 no.6, continued as
foundational processional, whilst Boulezian fantasy ignited and – that word
again – proliferated above. In retrospect, the Boulez of Pli selon pli, especially some of its later revisions, seemed
increasingly his own progenitor here. A somewhat deliberate reading of no.4 had
me wondering for a while, but won me round; no more than in the music of the ‘museum’
is there one ‘correct’ way to perform this music. Its openness to
interpretation is, and should be, at least as great as its openness to further
compositional development. The extraordinary Notation II – everyone’s favourite, so far? – brought the house
down, as, in my experience, it always has. It threatens to veer out of control,
testing the limits of even the most expert orchestra, yet never quite does so.
Again, Mahler reimagined. To quote from that 2010 interview for a second time, ‘There’s the
Mahler quotation again, “the material composes for you.”’
Pli selon pli proved, as one
would have hoped, a fitting climax. If ever there were a Boulez work that
seemed to cry out for the word ‘masterpiece’ it must surely be this. Or Le Marteau sans maître, or Répons, or … But, however, over-used
that word, here, once again, it seemed fitting. Arnold Whittall’s description
of Boulez’s ‘modern classicism’ seemed once more very much the thing; and yet,
this work is not so ‘closed’ as it may seem, emphatic though the closing of the
circle at the end of ‘Tombeau’ remains. A quality I am almost tempted to call ‘symphonic’
has always been present in the work, but it seems more and more overwhelming,
almost ‘tragically’ so. (Perhaps I remain very much – too much? – under Mahler’s
spell? Certainly Boulez’s Mahler has been the
revelation in the last generation or so of Mahler performance.) Performance,
just as much as study of the score, reveals other possibilities – which may
never now be taken up; or which may indeed some day by others, just as Boulez has
responded to some of those by his predecesssors. Mallarmé, nevertheless,
remains; or as Boulez might have put it, Mallarmé demeure. (Boulez’s analysis
of the Rite of Spring, ‘Stravinsky
demeure’, is surely as essential to a cellular reading as ever it was.) The
transformation of verse into poetry is not the least important process at work
here; who knows, were the material to continue to develop, might the ravishing
vocal line disappear entirely? That is not to denigrate the excellent
contribution of Yeree Suh to the performance. Perhaps less overtly sensual,
even erotic, than Boulez’s 2011 Barbara Hannigan, Suh offered a straightforward
integrity that was very much her own, and which sounded very much at ease with
Fischer’s own approach. There will be further penetrations into the Boulezian
labyrinth, into Mallarmé’s sirens, shipwrecks, lava, tombs, and all; in the
meantime, this ‘classical’ performance did very well indeed. The dizzying yet
now (relatively) stabilised interplay between different formal levels continues
to challenge, to beguile, to point to an open future. Serialism demeure.
