Roundhouse, Camden
Boulez:
Initiale
Messiaen:
Sept
haïkai
Ustvolskaya:
Composition
no.2, ‘Dies irae’
Ligeti:
Ramifications
Benjamin:
Palimpsests
Ueli Wiget (piano)
Ensemble Modern
George Benjamin (conductor)
Pierre Boulez’s Initiale was chosen to inaugurate
Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal almost two years ago to the day. If not
quite inaugurating the Roundhouse, home to what seem to have been some of
Boulez’s most memorable concerts during his time with the BBC, it nonetheless
offered a fitting fanfare to the Wigmore Hall’s new series of new music
concerts there. George Benjamin and the Ensemble Modern had given splendid
performances ‘at
home’ on Wigmore Street the previous night.
Here the ensemble was in full orchestral form, at least for three of the five
pieces, though none is conventionally scored by late-Romantic standards. Initiale, in any case, is for brass
septet. I had imagined, foolishly, that the instruments might, in homage to
Gabrieli et al., have been placed around us. The hall is on the large side for
that, whatever might have worked in Berlin. In both this and Messiaen’s Sept haïkai, my ears took a while to
adjust to the acoustic, but there was nevertheless much to be gleaned in this
miniature masterclass in typically Boulezian proliferation. It left one wanting
more – which, in a way, we received – from Boulez’s teacher.
Messaien seems to have become
strangely unfashionable at the moment; perhaps he awaits ‘rediscovery’. He
unquestionably deserves it. Boulez had conducted the 1963 premiere, with Yvonne
Loriod at the piano. I had a few doubts, especially to start with, concerning
this performance, but again I think the need to adjust to the acoustic may have
been the real enemy here. Ueli Wiget certainly relished the virtuosity of the
piano part, especially in the extraordinary cadenza-like passages, their roots
very much in nineteenth-century pianism, quite transformed here by the
unmistakeable voice and imagination of this most singular of composers.
Benjamin had the measure – in more than one sense – of the music’s varying
metrical demands, quite rightly making light of them, art concealing art. Birds
sang, chimes sounded, vistas were made manifest before our eyes and ears,
synaesthetic or otherwise.
Perhaps the greatest surprise
on the programme was Galina Ustvolskaya’s Composition
no.2, ‘Dies irae’, for eight double basses, percussion (a huge wooden block),
and piano. The word ‘uncompromising’ is all too readily reached for, both
generally and specifically, but is almost impossible to avoid here. I was
surprised both by Benjamin’s inclusion of the work and indeed by the power with
which it struck me, neither he nor I necessarily being the most obvious
audience for this music. Its starkness, its unswerving faith, its economy of
means provided many points of comparison and contrast with Messiaen’s music.
Neither is music with which one argues; or, if one does, one will come off the
worse. Performances, nicely lodged between ritual and drama – I even thought
briefly, however incongruously, of Parsifal
– likewise brooked no dissent. For me, this perhaps proved the revelation, a decidedly un-Boulezian revelation, of the
programme.
Whereas I had thought
Ustvolskaya’s piece might have been the one to stand out oddly from the rest of
the programme, it was actually Ligeti’s Ramifications
I had more trouble placing in context with the others. Perhaps it was chosen
simply as a work Boulez had performed here in those earlier Roundhouse
concerts. It hardly mattered, in any case. Whether it were my ears or the
playing that had now properly adjusted, or both, I do not know; what I do know
is that Ligeti’s masterwork registered with great clarity and drama. Benjamin
and his players, as well as the score ‘itself’, drew one in, compelled one to
listen – to listen in ways one could never have imagined, even if one had
actually approached them before. The differences in tuning between string
groups proved so richly expressive that one never so much as noticed the lack
of metre in a conventional sense. (Perhaps that was the definite contrast with
the works preceding?) Swarming string plainsong – its reimagination, at any
rate, if only by me – reinvented tradition before our ears.
Benjamin’s own Palimpsests was written for Boulez and
the LSO – who, if memory serves correctly, had vividly relished the challenges.
(How could they not?) Both movements – ‘Palimpsest I’ and ‘Palimpsest II’, the
first originally performed as a stand-alone work – recreate not only vertically
but horizontally the drama of rediscovery, of rereading a succession of
manuscript texts. So, at least, it sounded here, in splendidly committed performances.
A brass interjection here, a seraphic flight of fancy there played with ideas
of what was and what might have been: all part of a whole that yet depended
upon the call of the moment. Some, at least, of the roots of Written
on Skin sounded uncommonly apparent: emotionally as well as
intellectually, whatever the fallacy of the dichotomy. Was such writing and
rewriting not, after all, one of the points both of programme and performance?
