Pierre Boulez Saal
Beethoven:
Sonata for horn and piano
in F major, op.17
Bartók:
Sonata for two pianos and
percussion, Sz 100
Boulez:
sur
Incises
Radek Baborák (French horn)
Karim Said, Denis Kozhukhin,
Michael Wendeberg (piano)
Aline Khouri, Susanne Kabalan,
Stephen Fitzpatrick (harp)
Lev Loftus, Dominic Oelze,
Pedro Torrejón Gonzáles (percussion)
Daniel Barenboim (piano, conductor)
Two-and-a-half years after the opening
of Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal, in a
programme climaxing in Pierre Boulez’s sur
Incises, the hall’s resident Boulez Ensemble, drawn from members of the
Staatskapelle Berlin and West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, returned, neither for
the first time, nor, I suspect, for the last, to a work that seems almost to
define not only the performing space, not only its memories, but just as much
its potentialities. In that, it takes its leave from Boulez’s own method of
proliferation, his own pattern of works-in-progress, his own incomparable, endlessly
proliferating legacy for all musicians and music-lovers, and indeed for all
those interested in reimagination of performing spaces in the line of Boulez’s
cherished concept of the salle modulable.
First, however, came two other
Bs: Beethoven and Bartok; and a third, that other presiding musical presence of
the Boulez Saal: Barenboim. What a joy it was not only to hear Beethoven’s Horn
Sonata, op.17, but to hear it in such an enlightened performance, from Radek
Baborák and Daniel Barenboim. A horn call as forthright as it was perfectly
judged of tone seemed the perfect way to open a new season: rooted not only in
the Austro-German musical past, but in Beethoven, a prelude to next year’s
anniversary. (And if people do not like that prospect, they should, quite
frankly, stop their childish posturing and grow up.) Barenboim’s melting,
post-Mozartian response reminded us why he stands as one of the very few great
Beethovenians alive (indeed the only one, as conductor). A few first movement
exposition smudges, of interest only to carpers, were banished upon the repeat.
What mattered was Beethoven’s spirit, revealed in a performance of perfect
balance and tempo, the latter flexible, yet never drawing attention to itself
in the subtlety of that flexibility. It was, above all, a performance grounded
in harmonic understanding, without which all else will be in vain (and more
than often is, in contemporary Beethoven performance). The recapitulation
brought a fine sense of return, and some magically soft playing, Baborák’s
phrasing, here and elsewhere, to die for. A gravely beautiful, properly vocal Poco adagio quasi andante led to a
finale that proved, again, quite perfectly judged in its post-Mozartian spirit.
Darker passages told, albeit without exaggeration, in an account both poignant
and ebullient.
It was a welcome occasion indeed
to hear Bartók’s Sonata for two pianos and percussion: not only as precursor to
sur Incises, but also in relation to Peter Eötvös’s Sonata per sei, heard
the previous day at the Berlin Philharmonie’s Kammermusiksaal. The first
movement’s opening, imbued with suspense, erupted in well-nigh Boulezian éclat; and again, although quite
rightly, differently. This was to be a performance that surprised, even when
one ‘knew’: that is to say, it was to be a performance in the emphatic sense,
pianists, Michael Wendeberg and Denis Kozhukhin, and percussionists, Dominic
Oelze and Lev Loftus, alike revelling in the potentialities of live thinking
and communication. Bartók’s music was made strange in the best sense, these
fine musicians riding a defiantly untamed tiger and (more than) living to tell
the tale. How inevitably. The score unfolded, grew, developed, taking in
predecessors such as Beethoven and Bach in a sense extending far beyond the
relative banality of ‘influence’. Its spatial element, prophetic for Boulez
among others, felt especially immediate in this space. Inevitability – not in
the sense of dullness, but a ‘rightness’ that, in retrospect, could not have been other – characterised the slow
movement too, percussion processional joined by Wendeberg, then by Kozhukhin,
in playing of almost Mozartian perfection (not only the pianists!) Form
dramatically revealed itself; so too did the wildest, most compelling of night
music. As in the Beethoven sonata, the final movement proved in every sense a
finale, almost as fascinating to watch – for instance, how the percussionists,
sometimes unexpectedly, shared their load – as to hear. Counterpoint lived and
thrilled in a performance that was not remotely safe, and was all the better
for that, culminating in a splendidly witty and beguiling close.
sur Incises has many roots: most obviously in the solo
piano piece, Incises (written originally
for the Umberto Micheli Piano Competition,
with which Maurizio Pollini had a strong association). Boulez’s first
intention, as he explained in a 1998 interview, was to ‘transform this piece
into a longer one for Pollini and a group of instrumentalists, a kind of piano
concerto although without reference to the traditional form.’ Other ghosts
reared their head, though, such as Bartók’s Sonata and Stravinsky’s Les Noces. In this context,
unsuprisingly, Bartók offered a strong point of departure – opening similarly,
yet differently, de profundis – yet,
as with so much of Boulez’s music, it was his conception of serialism as open-ended,
ever-expanding, that dazzled. The spatial element is, of
course, crucial. Here, again, it was greatly assisted by the hall and its
acoustic, enabling us not only to hear but truly to feel the interplay between the
ensemble as a whole (a giant reinvention of the piano, one might say), solo
lines, and differently constituted groups within: three groups, considered
vertically, each of percussion, harp, and piano, and, horizontally, the three
percussionists, the three harpists, and the three pianists. Here, in the line
of Boulez’s – and Barenboim’s – beloved Parsifal,
not only did space become time, both became music. The way a trill passed
across all three piano keyboards, Wendeberg and Kozhukhin joined by the equally
excellent Karim Said, would offer but one case in point. Magic squares sensual,
musical, conceptual, above all thrilling played themselves out and reinvented
themselves before our eyes and ears (the ‘thinking ear’, as the hall’s motto
has it). Whatever the antecendents, it was vividly clear that Boulez’s own proliferating
method of generation actually had little in common with either Beethoven or
Bartók; likewise his, and Barenboim’s, control of liminal suspense and propulsive
release. The work, like the two that had preceded it, passed as if in no time,
whetting the appetite for more, much more, in the weeks, months, years to come.
This hall and the events within, then, continue as a work-in-progress, very
much in Boulez’s sense.
