Milton Court
Initiale
Messagesquisse
Dérive 1
Sonatine for flute and piano
Anthèmes 2 for violin and live electronics
Benjamin Marquise Gilmore (violin)
David Cohen (cello)
Gareth Davies (flute)
Joseph Horvat (piano)
Sound Intermedia
LSO Chamber Ensemble
Guildhall School Cellos
Maxime Pascal (conductor)
The Boulez centenary celebrations are underway. If London’s – and much of the rest of the world’s – response so far looks more muted than one might have hoped, something is better than nothing and there is all the more reason to cherish what we have. Following an afternoon symposium (oddly timed on a Monday, when most of us must work) the Barbican Centre offered an excellent chamber concert of five works, from LSO musicians and friends, directed where appropriate by Maxime Pascal.
What could have been better as an opening than the 1987 brass fanfare Initiale, which I had last heard at the opening of Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal thirty years later? Although Milton Court lacks a ready possibility – at least unless electronics are employed – for the Gabrieli-like spatial element deployed in Frank Gehry’s Berlin hall, the LSO players’ balcony elevation nonetheless signalled development of our concert expectations beyond Boulez’s ‘museum’ of the musical past. Metrical complexity, rubato implied through exactitude, was there from the off. More kaleidoscopic and varied in mood than your typical fanfare, its cascading, proliferating echoes of Répons helped establish aural expectations for what was to come.
Messagesquisse was given by David Cohen and six cellists from the Guildhall School (Gabriel Francis-Deqhani, Kosta Popovic, Nathaniel Horton, James Conway, Theo Bently Curtin, and Seth Collin), conducted by Pascal with properly Boulezian precision and commitment. I was again intrigued and delighted by the tricks music could play on my perception—or perhaps the other way round. Initially, I could have sworn one cello was not playing, only to see and then hear that it was, at a pitch I had mistakenly thought another was: a smaller-scale sense, perhaps, of that sense of spatial magic squares that would so inform a later masterwork such as sur Incises (via, perhaps, common inspiration ultimately in Les Noces). Brimming with melody, impassioned of mood, harmonically compelling: it was everything Boulez is, and everything his detractors would say his music is not. Dynamic contrasts and all manner of other post-Beethovenian dialectics abounded in ‘organised delirium’. Contagious proliferation of a single line suggested at times a very French inheritance in the music of the clavecinistes. At times, I even thought of Nono. And what performances these were, reminding any who might need it of the crucial role of performance in Boulez’s music.
The shifting transformations of Dérive 1 proved an similar yet different delight, music spiralling before our ears in a mesmerising tour of aural pleasure. The temptation was to ask for more, which of course we should eventually have in its successor, Dérive 2. This music, though, spoke for itself, no mere precursor but a masterwork of proliferation in its own right.
The Sonatine for flute and piano received an outstanding and confounding performance from Gareth Davies and Joseph Havlet. No one would dispute the work’s allure, yet the array of elements in its first movement that might – just might – have to them something of the more neoclassical Schoenberg (and Debussy) seemed more than ever to rejoice in the necessity of internal and eternal explosion and destruction. It might not sound quite ‘like’ the Second Piano Sonata, but the Sonatine’s progress suggested ever closer kinship, emotionally and intellectually. Here, it felt, was instantiated a post-Notations world of infinite possibility.
Last up was Benjamin Maruise Gilmore with Ian Dearden and Jonathan Green of Sound Intermedia in Anthèmes 2. Its world of violin and electronics sounded, like much else, both old and new: not so very different from Messagesquisse or other works with solo and double/shadow, and yet… Echoes expected and unexpected beguiled and surprised as music from plainchant to Messiaen and beyond ricocheted around us. Indeed, an unsuspected harmonic sweetness suggested what remain less acknowledged lessons learned from Boulez’s teacher. As waves of sound lapped upon our consciousnesses, it was Debussy’s La Mer, endlessly transformed, that next suggested itself as fons et origo; that and, of course, the composer’s own endless imagination. The museum lives and develops; so do music and performance history of Boulez, one of its newer recruits.
