Cadogan Hall
Boulez, arr. Johannes
Schöllhorn – Notations II, XI, X (1945,
arr. 2011, United Kingdom premiere)
Schöllhorn – La Treizième (2011, United Kingdom
premiere)Shiori Usui – Ophiocordyceps unilateralis s.l. (2015, world premiere)
Betsy Jolas – Wanderlied (2003, United Kingdom premiere)
Joanna Lee – Hammer of Solitude (2015, BBC commission, world premiere)
Boulez – Dérive 2 (1988-2006, rev.2009)
Ulrich Heinen (cello)
Hilary Summers (contralto)Birmingham Contemporary Music Group
Franck Ollu (conductor)
It might seem churlish to
complain about the BBC Proms coverage of Pierre Boulez’s 90th
anniversary. After all, there are a few performances dotted around – although
some seem rather oddly programmed, as if embarrassed at the presence of new or
newish music. (That could certainly not be claimed in the present case.) Yet I
cannot help but wish that someone had shown the imagination and necessary
determination to programme Boulez’s electronic masterpiece, Répons: for once, surely a work that
might have been revealed to good advantage in the Royal Albert Hall. For that,
one alas – as so often – has not only to go elsewhere, but abroad: be it to
Paris, Amsterdam, Salzburg… (I have opted for Salzburg next month, and look
forward to the Ensemble Intercontemporain under Matthias Pintscher revealing
the work in the flesh to me for the first time.)
Anyway, missed opportunities aside
– by the way, how about some Stockhausen? I’ve never heard a better-suited ‘RAH
work’ than Cosmic
Pulses – we heard a well-, often very well-performed Proms Matinée at
Cadogan Hall, with no shortage of music that was either new to the country or
new to the world. First up were three of Johannes Schöllhorn’s arrangements for
ensemble of Notations (the piano
originals, not Boulez’s extraordinary orchestral expansions). The Birmingham
Contemporary Music Group under Franck Ollu sounded slightly unfocused to start
with, but Notation X had a very keen rhythmic sense. La Treizième was a nice surprise: one bar from each of the twelve
added together, to form another, intriguingly unified twelve-bar piece. It
actually put me a little in mind of the revisiting of earlier waltzes in Ravel’s
Valses nobles et sentimentales,
though perhaps I am just being a little sentimental
there. I liked Schöllhorn’s
sous-bois very much when I heard
it at the Wigmore Hall last year; we need to hear more of him in this country.
A Proms performance of a larger-scale work would be greatly appreciated another
season.
Shiori Usui’s Ophiocordyceps unilateralis s.l. will
surely face little competition for the foreseeable future in the world of
nomenclature. We learned from a brief conversation between the composer and Tom
Service that the piece is named after an infectious fungus which works its
negative magic upon ants. (Whilst I remember, the printed programmes for the
Saturday Matinées are, quite simply, a disgrace: not a single word on either
the works or the non-Boulez composers. Can something equivalent to the evening
concerts, or at least something better than that not be managed?) In five very
short movements – ‘Camponotus leonarci’, ‘Spores’, ‘Pathology’, ‘The Grip’, and
‘Hyphae’ – we heard a considerable array of ensemble colour, very different in
each case. There was perhaps a sense of Boulezian éclat, albeit more overtly, or at least conventionally, thematic,
and also sometimes more tonal in language. It was elevating to see one
newspaper critic rise from his seat and leave after that performance; it will
be interesting to see whether his review covers the rest of the concert.
Betsy Jolas is but a year
younger than Boulez. We seem to hear her music very little in this country; the
United Kingdom premiere of Wanderlied
was therefore especially welcome. Wanderlied
was inspired by the idea of an old woman (the cello) travelling from town to town as
storyteller, the tile borrowed from a 1943 poem by Jolas’s father. Crowds
gather around the woman and comment, but two people in the crowd do not like
her, yet continue to follow. What emerged was a long-breathed, humorous piece,
assure both of craft and emotional expression, timbre not surprisingly an
important connecting force between the two, insofar – a big ‘insofar’ – as they
may be separated. I thought of it as, in a way, a song without words, or
perhaps better a cantata without words. Jolas looked, by the way, almost
incredibly sprightly on stage, so we have every reason to hear a good deal more
from her, programming permitting.
I wish I could be so
enthusiastic, or indeed at all enthusiastic, about Joanna Lee’s Hammer of Solitude. The idea fits,
clearly a reference to Le Marteau sans
maître – and the participation of Hilary Summers fitted too. Summers proved
her usual self, that most individual of voices as communicative with words and
notes as one could ask for. Alas, the three movements – ‘The hammer alone in
the house’, ‘A presentiment’, and ‘A suicide’ – seem strangely childish, which
is not to say childlike, in construction and expression. Word-painting is
obsessive, yet basic, almost as if following a guide in a compositional
exercise. The (very) sub-Berberian noises at the opening hint at a greater
ambition, which yet remains unrealised. The final line: ‘Release complete,
relief’. Quite.
Finally, Dérive 2. It is the Boulez work I still find the most difficult to
come to grips with; I cannot claim to ‘understand’ it and indeed find it almost
disconcertingly ‘pleasant’ in its progress. Boulez’s constructivism, albeit a
flowing constructivism, came across clearly and, crucially, with structural as
well as expressive meaning. The ghost of Messiaen seemed intriguingly to hover,
or rather to fly, at times, not least in some of those gloriously splashy piano
chords. The ‘lead’ taken by different instruments at different times was,
perhaps, more than usually apparent, suggesting almost an updated sinfonia
concertante, whereas, for instance, Daniel Barenboim’s performances (see here
and here;
number three will come in Salzburg next month) have emerged, at least to my
ears, as more orchestrally conceived. As is the way with even half-decent
performances of such music, I noticed things I had never heard before.
Something that especially struck me on this occasion was the timbral similarity
– surely testament to Boulez’s work as conductor – to a passage in The Rite of Spring. I shall have to look
at the scores to find where and when, or perhaps I shall never re-discover what
my ears were telling me on that occasion. Such is a good part of the mystery
and the magic of live performance.
