Royal Festival Hall
Boulez – Dérive 1
Boulez – Anthèmes 2Stockhausen – Hymnen: Region III
It is with great sadness that I
find this Boulez anniversary year drawing to a close. What a year it has been,
with magnificent performances of the composer’s œuvre across Europe (it would
seem far
less so in the United States, the New York Philharmonic’s silence unforgivable).
Those wishing to programme Boulez’s music should now have every justification
they need: a wealth of performers possessed of both passion and excellence, and
large audiences, hungry to hear more. (That goes for so much post-war New
Music, which, bizarrely, I suppose we can still just about call this
repertoire.) Yet I fear that silence will resume come 2016, the most
reactionary in the audience – who, for some reason, seem always to have most
say – breathing a sigh of relief that they can safely return to wall-to-wall Rachmaninov.
Let us hope not and let us do
what we can to ensure not. The London Sinfonietta’s performances here were as
excellent as one might have expected, arguably still more so. Not least of my
musical epiphanies this year was the moment when Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra finally had Dérive 2 click into place for me. What
had puzzled me – and what some friends had disdained as unworthy of the
composer – stood revealed as the masterpiece Barenboim had claimed. Dérive 1, which I do not think I have
heard performed this year otherwise, worked beautifully as an ‘overture’.
Boulez’s writing, the Sinfonietta’s playing, and Wolfgang Lischke’s
finely-judged direction drew one in: had one lose oneself again in material
from Répons
and Messagesquisse. What one might, I
suppose, call developing variation – Boulez’s fabled Brahms-scepticism notwithstanding
– manifested itself with equal clarity and warmth, almost as if we were hearing
it from the composer himself. The six chords ‘derived’ from SACHER worked their
magic: melodic, harmonic, structural. One felt – as well as knew intellectually
– the processes, in an intriguing dialectic between Stravinskian clarity and
Debussyan ambiguity, at work, and longed for more, indeed for Dérive 2.
Clio Gould’s performance of Anthèmes 2 with the ever-excellent Sound
Intermedia was quite outstanding, immediately rendering irrelevant any doubts
about the suitability of the venue. Again – and perhaps this was a consequence
of a good few performance opportunities throughout the year – connections with
other works manifested themselves, but they were of secondary importance when
compared with the confidence, virtuosity, and musicality with which Gould
performed this indispensable work. It sounded and resounded with all the
musical drama and depth of a solo violin work by Bach. In fact, the great D
minor Chaconne came to my mind, relevantly or otherwise, as an unacknowledged
progenitor. Light and shadow, concision and proliferation, harmony and
counterpoint intellectual and emotional drama: all of these and many more
combined in ways that seemed created almost on the spot, in order to offer the
most ‘compleat’ performance I have heard of the work. The humorous, throw-away
ending remains as splendid as ever.
Stockhausen probably does even
less well than Boulez in performing terms. The last big opportunity I had was
the unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime (I fear!) production of Mittwoch
in Birmingham. Opera companies across the world should unite, having nothing to
lose but their insipid – at best – bel
canto chains; instead, Licht
languishes unperformed as a whole, anywhere, ever. With this performance of
Region III from Hymnen, we heard and
again felt just a little of what we were missing. I must admit that I will
sometimes approach some of Stockhausen’s pronouncements on his music with a
little scepticism. (Surely not?!) However, words from the composer on process
and on what I think we can call meaning, words I only read afterwards, seemed
to me very much to tally with another fine performance, members of the London
Sinfonietta now joined by inspired and inspiring musicians from the Royal
Academy of Music Manson Ensemble. ‘National anthems,’ Stockhausen claimed, are
the most familiar music imaginable. … When familiar music is integrated into a
composition of unknown, new music, it is possible,’ and here it certainly
seemed accomplished, ‘to hear especially well how it was integrated:
untransformed, more or less transformed, transposed or modulated. The more
self-evident the what, the more attentive one becomes to the how.’ (Think, for
instance, of Webern’s and Schoenberg’s Bach transcriptions.) Yet, equally
importantly, ‘national anthems are more than national anthems; they are “charged”
with time, with history – with past, present and future. They accentuate the
subjectivity of people in a time when uniformity is all too often mistaken for
universality.’ An intriguing, provocative thought, but not just a thought:
there seemed in performance to be genuine experience, through those musical
processes, of that thought. Objets
trouvés took on or, better, continued lives of their own, somewhere in
between integration and transformation. We asked what their relationship to us
was, had been, might yet be. Insofar as I could tell, the musicians seemed to
responding aurally as well as to what was written for them; I do not know the
work well enough to be sure. What I can be sure of is that the performance
convinced me, and again left me wanting to hear more. Next time, let us hope, more
than a single Region, but many thanks indeed are due to the London Sinfonietta
for this opportunity, splendidly taken!
The Stockhausen performance was
recorded by BBC Radio 3 to form part of its broadcast quadrophonic sound premiere
of Hymnen on New Year’s Day, 2016. It
is described as being part of its ‘New Year New Music focus’; I suppose we
should disregard the unloveliness of the phrase and be grateful that Radio 3
still broadcasts such music at all.
