Barbican Hall
Boulez – Livre pour cordes
Stravinsky – The Rite of SpringBoulez – Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna
Although he has not (at least
I do not think he has) ever held a formal position with the London Symphony
Orchestra, Pierre Boulez has been a regular visitor to the orchestra; indeed, I
have written more than once on his visits here. Not the least of their
collaborations was Boulez’s first Complete Webern (the second more ‘complete’,
including many of the works without opus numbers), a recording project which
can safely be said to be ‘historic’ in the best sense of forever having changed
public understanding of the composer’s work – arguably Boulez’s as well as
Webern’s. Now that Boulez’s conducting days appear to be behind him – and if he
were only a conductor, he would
surely still be considered one of the most significant forces in New Music, as
some of us might still, quaintly, call it – it fell to Peter Eötvös to conduct
the LSO’s ninetieth-birthday tribute. This was no mere second best, but a fascinating,
provocative concert in its own right, in some senses very much in line with
Boulez’s own work, in some senses going fascinatingly beyond, even coming into
fruitful conflict. Just, then, as it should have been.
First up was Boulez’s Livre pour cordes, which I had heard recently
in a very different performance from the Vienna Philharmonic and Daniel Barenboim. Here there was less Viennese sweetness –
I suspect that the very different acoustics of Berlin’s Philharmonie and London’s
Barbican Hall will have had something to do with that too – and indeed, the
opening of the first movement was decidedly un-easy, even neo-expressionist. In
general, Boulez’s music here sounded much closer to Webern, in particular to
his op.5 Five Movements, and I also
found it sounded closer to the original work for string quartet, if still
nevertheless impossible to reduce to its origins. Perhaps surprisingly, then, a
work for strings sounded more like a work expressly for strings from the LSO
than it did even from the VPO. Eötvös shared Barenboim’s taste for musical
drama, but here it seemed almost to be ‘after’ Schoenberg’s op.34, Begleitmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene.
Too often nowadays, we have
cause to complain about performances that treat The Rite of Spring as a mere orchestral showpiece. That is
testament in part, of course, to the rise in playing standards; it would be foolish
to try to make that opening bassoon solo less technically secure, out of
misguided concern for ‘authenticity’, but the tight-rope is now undoubtedly
less of a challenge to today’s excellent players, such as tonight’s Daniel
Jemison. But it is also a matter of conductors who fail to convey, perhaps even
to appreciate, what can and must still shock in this extraordinary score. Eötvös
is certainly not one of them; nor was Boulez. However, whereas Boulez, the last
time I heard him conduct the work, had tended to reveal often surprising
affinities with Wagner, even Mahler, this was perhaps the most brazenly
modernistic account I have heard in the flesh. An incredibly bleak, rather slow
opening intrigued. Flexibility of tempo, however, led us inexorably towards
that necessary – ‘necessity’ was a thought that often occurred to me – teeming of
life, which threatened more than it promised hope. Playing was fierce, precise,
abrasive in the best sense, but not without melancholy or, especially from the
wind, a Petrushka-like ‘Russianness’. Divided violins paid dividends too:
not, I felt, out of concern for ‘correctness’, but in order to heighten the
strange, utterly compelling sense of chamber-like cooperation and conversation between
different sections and indeed different parts within sections. Throughout,
Stravinsky’s cellular technique was audibly, meaningfully apparent, emphasising
just how different his concerns were from those of the Austro-German ‘mainstream’.
What particularly fascinated, was how, delivered as it was, perhaps not
coincidentally, with strikingly Boulezian gesture and economy, Eötvös’s
interpretation seemed to look forward, not only to late Stravinsky and indeed
to the post-war avant garde, but even to the decidedly non-Boulezian Stravinsky
of the 1920s and ’30s: Symphonies of Wind
Instruments, yes, but also the neo-Classical works. Hiératique, then, to borrow a marking from one of Boulez’s Notations, but not necessarily in the
way he meant it. The controlled delirium – a Boulezian idea, if ever there were
one – of the ‘Procession of the Sage’ and the weird mystery of the Sage himself
were truly shocking: if you will pardon the cliché, it really did feel as if I
were hearing the work for the first time.
The Second Part sounded
wonderfully world-weary: perhaps, here, there was a little more of the
Wagnerian, even Parsifalian, to Eötvös’s reading. (Or perhaps I was projecting;
it probably does not matter too much.) The sense hereafter of tragic necessity
was overwhelming. Balancing of instruments was quite remarkable; for instance,
the strangeness of an early duet for violin and flute, which seemed like an
eery, substantially wilder premonition
of something from later in the composer’s career. (It really would be
fascinating to hear Eötvös in Stravinsky at his most polemically
neo-Classical.) The approach and reality of sacrifice were brutal, hysterical:
terrifying. Musical process guaranteed the dramatic feeling of inevitability.
And yet, there was room for caprice too. That, as Webern pointed out in The Path to the New Music, is where art
comes in, and we should add performance to composition in that respect. ‘To
develop everything … from one principal idea! That is the strongest
unity… But in what form? That is where art comes in!’
It was something of a
revelation to hear Rituel: in memoriam
Bruno Maderna in the aftermath of The
Rite. It was certainly hiératique again.
Melodic lines seemed to find their lineage in Stravinsky as much as in Debussy
and Messiaen. They also spoke of and with Boulez’s own voice, seemingly echoing
from as far back as the piano Notations,
but also looking forward to the orchestral version. The emotional weight was
reminiscent of Boulez’s Mahler, never mistaking sentiment for sentimentality,
and all the heavier for it. In this great profession of grief, a post-Messiaen
processional took its course, again with the utmost inevitability. The LSO
players, one felt, could almost, not quite, have managed the performance for
themselves; Eötvös wisely restricted his contributions to when they were
necessary. There was no more showmanship to his conducting than to Boulez; and
yet, in both cases, true ‘individuality’ of conception and voice resounded all
the more strongly. Spatial concerns pointed towards Répons; this, one felt, was Boulez and perhaps Eötvös too at their
most ‘religious’: quite different from the overt religiosity of Messiaen or
Stockhausen, but no less powerful, no less ‘real’. My immediate reaction was to
wish to hear the work performed again. Let us hope, then, that this year’s
performances will prove no anniversary flash in the pan.
