Pierre Boulez Saal
Mozart – Oboe Quartet in F
major, KV 370/368b
Boulez – Le Marteau sans maîtreSchoenberg – Chamber Symphony no.1 in E major, op.9
Donatienne Michel-Dansac (contralto)
Boulez Ensemble
François-Xavier Roth (conductor)
At last: a hall that programmes
the concerts I should love to programme – or, perhaps more to the point, not so
distant from the concerts Boulez might have programmed. The Pierre Boulez Saal
is not Boulez’s hall in name only. His vision of a ‘salle modulable’ extended
beyond its dimensions, its physical adaptability. Take a look at Boulez’s
orchestral programmes for any given year, any given month, and you will be
swept away by their mouthwatering promise. For instance, in June 1974, six
concerts on six consecutive evenings (!) in New York with its notoriously
reactionary Philharmonic Orchestra: (1) Brahms: Symphony no.4; Debussy, Ibéria;
Bartok, Music for Strings, Percussion,
and Celesta; (2) Handel, Music for
the Royal Fireworks; Mozart, Flute Concerto in G major, KV 313/285c; Webern, Concerto, op.24; Varèse, Octandre; Ligeti, Aventures, Nouvelles aventures; (3) Schumann, Symphony no.2 in C
major, op.61; Berg, Three Movements from
the ‘Lyric Suite; Ravel, Daphnis et Chlioé,
Suites 1 and 2; (4) Bach, Brandenburg Concerto no.3; Schubert, Symphony no.2 in
B-flat major, D 125; Webern, Symphony, op.21; Boulez, Improvisations sur Mallarmé 1 and 2; Stravinsky, L’Histoire du Soldat: Suite; (5) Schoenberg, Serenade, op.24; Ode to Napoleon, op.41; Pierrot lunaire, op.21; (6) Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht, op.4; Berg, Three Fragments from ‘Wozzeck’;
Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring. Bliss it must have been in that dawn to
have been alive.
Such, however, is increasingly
the case here too. Moreover, with the ‘thinking ear’ that is the hallmark of
this new hall, each and every audience member can and should draw his or her
own connections and contrasts, continuities and dialectics, essentially
becoming a programmer in his or her own right: ‘in real time’, as the
performance progresses. The doldrums of subscription concerts and their bored
subscribers – why would one attend a two-hour performance, irrespective of what
was being performed and who was performing it, simply because it was ‘on’? – have
long deserved to be banished. More than once, they frustrated Boulez, not least
in his desire to perform Busoni’s Doktor
Faust in New York. Perhaps now, at long last, we are beginning to make
another start.
That will not happen, of
course, without excellent performances; indeed, Boulez would recall that one of
the banes of his earlier musical life had been well-meaning, yet technically
insufficient, performances of new(ish) music, above all that of the Second
Viennese School, which did more harm than good. It was one of the reasons he
set up the Domaine musical, a forerunner, we might think, of the Ensemble
Intercontemporain (on this same evening celebrating its fortieth anniversary in
Paris), and of Daniel Barenboim’s own Boulez Ensemble, drawn from both the
Staatskapelle Berlin and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, as well as from
those teaching at the Barenboim-Said Akademie and guest artists.
Here, this flexible ensemble,
under the direction of François-Xavier Roth for the latter two items in the
programme, and playing ‘simply’ as a chamber group for the first, justified the
hopes placed in it as an ambassador for this musical mission. In Mozart’s Oboe
Quartet, the players (Cristina Gómez Godoy (oboe), Yuki Manuela Janke (violin),
Volker Sprenger (viola), and Kian Soltani (cello)) drew one in, made one
listen, even seduced one into doing so. The acoustic, with its near-ideal blend
of clarity and warmth helped, but again, that will come to naught if the
performance is not also up to scratch. The difficult path between chamber and concertante
work was carefully, or better confidently, trodden, so that the ear’s natural
inclination to treat the oboe as separate from the strings was neither entirely
denied nor indulged. Indeed, subtly shifting balances, always musically
justified, were a hallmark of the performance – looking forward, perhaps, to
the worlds of Schoenberg and Boulez. Phrasing was always impeccable, but never ‘in
itself’; one always had a keen sense of response and its necessity, generating
form rather than being moulded by a prior formula. The difference between an
aria-like slow movement and an actual aria was clear; we heard the oboe (and
not just the oboe) as soloist, but we heard what only it could do, rather than
an imitation of a singer, however close the kinship. The warmth and, on
occasion, involved quality of the so-called ‘accompaniment’ again looked
forward to works later in the programme. Above all, perhaps, each movement,
whilst contributing to the whole, had its own ‘character’, the Rondeau finale – a favourite gambit for
Mozart – an especial joy in that respect, just so long as one listened.
Donatienne Michel-Dansac joined
Roth and his players (Yulia Deyneka (viola), Claudia Stein (alto flute), Lev
Loftus (percussion), Pedro Torrejón González (vibraphone), Adrian Salloum
(xylorimba), and Seth Josel (guitar)) for that landmark in post-war modernism:
Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître. Roth
and Michel-Dansac have performed the work together before; their close
partnership showed. But first, of course, the ensemble had its say, the ‘soloist’
not entering until the third of the nine movements. There was nowhere for the
players to hide – just like in Mozart – but they had no need of anywhere to
hide, their performances duly confident, even commanding. The occasional minor slip
or insecurity will trouble almost any ensemble in this fearsomely difficult
work, and will in no sense detract from the overall performance. What struck me
here was the kinship to Boulez’s earlier performances: not so much those ‘pointillistic’
1950s readings, although there was perhaps an element of that too, as those of
the 1960s and ’70s. There was less of a tendency towards what we might broadly,
perhaps too broadly, call Romanticism, and more of an emphasis upon the
cellular. (It will always, I think, be a matter of degree, but degree matters.)
Sometimes one needed to listen especially carefully to make the connections
between lines, especially those of different instruments; it was not that the
connection was not ‘there’, or that the listener had to do all the work, but
that (s)he was, perhaps by way of contrast rather than connection with Mozart,
less of an object of seduction. There was, indeed, a good deal of the shock of
the new, or at least the classically new. ‘Period’ Boulez? I am not sure, but,
as the composer’s grip over his works recedes into history, the possibility and
likelihood of alternative performative strategies seems likely to grow – even,
to use an appropriately Boulezian idea, to expand. Silences, intriguingly,
seemed to tell as strongly as they might in Bruckner.
Michel-Dansac’s performance
earlier on, for instance in ‘L’artisanat furieux’ seemed – and I do not mean
this as a value judgement – almost conventionally vocal, as if she were the
soloist in a Baroque cantata whose language might be French, but whose
inventiveness was that of Bach. If anything, intriguingly, her line seemed
simpler, more ‘vocal’, than one of Bach’s might have been, perhaps suggestive
of another French tradition: an updated Ramellian, or Ravelian, air? Art
conceals art, though, and the complexity of her part revealed itself over time:
development of a sort, if not quite how Mozart would have understood it. By the
time of the closing double to ‘Bel edifice et les pressentiments’, she and her
part were fully-fledged members of the ensemble. Hierarchy had been questioned
and transformed with the means of that time-honoured mode of vocal
experimentation: ‘tempo libre de récit’. Percussion seemed almost to acquire a
voice, just as the voice shed its words. And yet, there was finality too, to a
performance well-shaped.
Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony
was long a favourite work of Boulez’s. Listen to him performing it with his
Domaine musical musicians and you will find a bracing reading indeed, almost
spoiling for a fight. I heard him conduct the Scharoun
Ensemble (drawn from members of the Berlin Philharmonic) in 2008 in as
close to an all-encompassing performance as one could imagine, far more at ease
with itself, yet never wanting excitement. Roth likewise seemed to approach the
work as a classic – which surely by now it has long been. That is not to imply
lazy familiarity, but rather an appreciation of its formal and expressive (the
two are inextricably intertwined) greatness, which no longer needed to plead a
cause. Every member of the ensemble contributed an incalculable amount; each
part proved as crucial as any other. Balance was never an issue – or rather,
when it was, it was musically an issue, part of the performance, rather than
something detracting from an ‘ideal’ version thereof. For, just as in Mozart’s
Oboe Quartet, balances shifted; we looked, or listened, into a future of Klangfarbenmelodie, even of Boulez. It
was, though, above all the inventiveness of Schoenberg’s post-Lisztian
transformation of sonata form that provided the drama. Straussian, Wagnerian,
Brahmsian harmonies might come and go, refracted by the new uses to which they
were put, but the formal propulsion of work and performance were, quite
rightly, the principal narrative. This might, to return to that first cited New
York performance from Boulez in 1974, have been a Brahms symphony in itself –
and in many ways, that is just what it was. Shorn of the accoutrements of the
symphony orchestra, work and performance reminded us what the real point of
that orchestra and its continuing great tradition might yet be.
