Mozart-Saal, Konzerthaus
Boulez – Dérive 1 (1984)
Carter – Bariolage (1992)
Boulez – Improvisé – pour le Dr. K. (1969/2005)
Carter – Triple Duo (1983)
Boulez – Dérive 2 (1988-2009)
oenm (österrichsches ensemble für neue musik)
Johannes Kalitzke (conductor)
Pierre Boulez’s relationship to
Elliott Carter and to the music of the greatest of all American composers (so
far) ran long and deep. I was fortunate enough to attend the centenary concert
Boulez gave with the Ensemble Intercontemporain in London on Carter’s actual
hundredth birthday – when he was, celebratedly, still composing. As part of the
Vienna Konzerthaus’s Boulez festival, then, Carter was an obvious companion
composer to Boulez. Whether, in practice, this combination worked as well as I
had hoped, I am not sure, but that may actually more be a reflection of my
having come entirely fresh to the two Carter pieces on the programme (Triple Duo in particular surely
requiring more than a single listening). At any rate, these performances from
oenm, Triple Duo and Dérive 2 conducted by Johannes Kalitzke,
gave impressive accounts of the music.
Dérive
1 opened the programme,
its raw(ish)material by now – given its use in various other pieces – quite familiar
to me, yet nevertheless engendering an air of fantasy, of expectation, of play
that is ever surprising. Shifting balances caught the ear: not quite Klangfarbenmelodie, but perhaps not
quite not either. The exquisite finish of work and performance suggested
something aquatic, certainly not marmoreal. Nora Skuta’s excellent pianism
reminded me that, when we consider Boulez’s piano writing, we need to think of
works such as this too, not just the works for piano(s) alone. I found myself
especially intrigued by the similarities between and, still more, the
differences from, that and the equally fine vibraphone playing (Arabella
Hirner). Even here, let alone in Dérive 2,
process was very much fundamental to the experience.
Katharina Teufel’s performance
of Carter’s Bariolage, for solo harp,
seemed to delight in confounding lazy assumptions – which somehow remain, even
when one thinks one has banished them – concerning the instrument: not through
extended techniques, not through Lachenmann-style deconstruction, but somehow
just by writing and making music that is personal. One could make – and I think
I did – connections with its Boulez predecessor concerning fantasy and
temporality. Difference manifested itself at least as strongly, though, not
least in more overt virtuosity. It felt a little as if one were being taken for
a walk in an urban garden: ‘urban’, in the sense of urban modernity, a garden
of steel and sky, of glass and sunlight, planned and yet free. Time seemed
almost literally to fly: it was over almost before it had begun.
This was the first time I had
heard Boulez’s Improvisé – pour le Dr. K.
I came to it blind, or perhaps better, deaf, without programme notes or any
other information, learning only afterwards, from the Internet, that it had
been one of eleven pieces commissioned by Universal Edition for the eightieth
birthday of its director, Alfred Kalmus. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my ear
fastened on kinship with some of the figures and shapes of Dérive 1, but again, more strikingly, on difference. The prominence
of the clarinet (Theodor Burkali) brought to mind Schoenberg’s Pierrot ensemble and its post-war life,
before I actually realised what was staring me in the face as well as the ears:
this was, of course, the Pierrot ensemble:
flute, clarinet, piano, viola, and cello. That out of the way, Boulez’s typical,
yet never quite the same, ways with éclat and temporality came to the fore of
my listening: renewed and refreshed. I thought occasionally of Birtwistle
(clarinet again?) It was a splendid bagatelle, which I look forward to hearing
again, ideally alongside some of its companion pieces. Later, I discovered that
it had actually been written for the Pierrot Players, so my thought of
Birtwistle was perhaps not entirely absurd. (Only part of Boulez’s piece, an
extract for solo clarinet, was performed at the premiere, it seems.)
In Triple Duo, the instruments (flue/piccolo, clarinets, percussion,
piano, violin, cello) seemed to announce themselves as if they were
music-theatre characters, children of The
Solider’s Tale. Twists and turns in the ‘plot’ were constantly surprising,
even if I did not quite always follow. (As I said, I really need to hear the
piece again.) They were hard to reconcile, sometimes, but perhaps that is the
point. I was certainly made to think, integrative and disintegrative processes
enabling, even compelling, one to do so. I sometimes thought of proliferation,
not quite like Boulez’s later work, perhaps in a sense closer to the conjuring
tricks of Haydn. Reinvention, rehearing seemed important, at least to my
experience – and I think to the work as a whole, which unfolded dramatically,
as if in a sequence of scenes. The premiere was given in 1983, by The Fires of
London, successors to the Pierrot Players: a nice programming touch to learn
of, if only retrospectively.
This was doubtless in part
illusion, even delusion; yet, in context, Dérive
2 semeed to perform an integrative and yet centrifugal function with
respect to many of the musical tendencies heard in the first half. I also felt
in this performance a strange, far from unwelcome, sense of Boulez’s early
Artaudian frenzy classicised – which, thinking about it, is probably not so
very far from the mark, whatever the detractors of his later music might claim.
(‘Culinary’ is one description I have heard.) I picked up, this time, on
certain Stravinskian colours (combinations of instruments, even melodic cells),
coming to the surface, yet what was especially striking, certain kinship or
procedure with Ligeti and Carter notwithstanding, was just how unlike any other
music this began to sound. Indeed, I was especially struck by how unlike my
recollections of previous performances it sounded too. It was catchy, almost
balletic (imagine what Béjart might have done here!), serial processes bobbing
above that beguiling surface, swiftly submerged once again. La Mer did not seem so very far away, at
times, and Triple Duo seemed, by
comparison, just a little dry, even contrived. That transformative tendency in
Boulez’s music, with deep roots in the Second Viennese School, even perhaps in
Liszt and Wagner, reasserted, refreshed itself – or at least it did for me.
