Barbican Hall
Berg: Three Pieces from the Lyric Suite
Debussy, arr. John Adams: Le Livre de Baudelaire
Berg: Der Wein
Debussy: Nocturnes
Sophie Bevan (soprano)
Not the least of Pierre Boulez’s legacies, in London and across the world, is programming such as this. It may be difficult for us now to realise – given the disappointing size of the Barbican audience, less difficult than we might have hoped – but a concert of Berg and Debussy would not so long ago have seemed daring, even reckless. Boulez, one might say, created the ‘modern’ orchestral repertoire. There is some exaggeration in that. He did not do so alone, even in his generation: musicians such as Michael Gielen played crucial roles too. They had forerunners too, conductors such as Hans Rosbaud and Hermann Scherchen, as well as successors. Boulez’s time at the BBC was nonetheless pivotal for London musical life; his more general example was of incalculable significance. Hearing this concert just a few days after the Barbican and BBC’s Total Immersion event for Boulez’s centenary extended the celebration—and the homage.
Boulez would surely have appreciated the clarity of the BBC SO strings in the three movements from Berg’s Lyric Suite, and indeed throughout, under Ryan Wigglesworth’s leadership. The ‘Andante amoroso’ started polished, directed, and cool, though not cold, its temperature rising without ever sounding Romantic. Whilst string orchestra versions of quartet music have a tendency to sound smoothed over, less radical, in their new, orchestral guise, the second movement here was an exception, especially in its scurrying, heard with impressive unanimity. One was drawn in to listen, in a manner not dissimilar to Webern or Nono. Wigglesworth and the orchestra fashioned a fine interplay between texture and harmony. The ‘Adagio appassionata’ dug more overtly deep, emanating from the world of Wozzeck and Lulu—as if a staging post between them, which in a way it is. The Zemlinsky quotation (‘Du bist mein Eigen’) was poignant, meaningful, and generative: far more than mere quotation.
John Adams’s 1994 orchestration of Debussy’s Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire (minus the fifth, ‘La Mort des amants’) varied in its proximity to what the composer might have done. There is nothing wrong with that; it was always skilful and inventive on its own terms. The opening ‘Le Balcon’ did not sound especially Debussyan in that respect. Hearing it after Berg, its twists and turns sounded more Germanic than one might have expected. At any rate, Sophie Bevan communicated Baudelaire’s words with great clarity, shaping them, as Wigglesworth did the orchestra’s, unobtrusively yet to excellent effect. There was languor, but not too much, motion and overall shape well balanced. ‘Harmonie du soir’ was similarly evocative; it seemed at times to move closer to a Debussyan, as well as a Wagnerian (above all Tristan) orchestral and particularly string sound. Pelléas hovered in the wings vocally for the final two, the charged language another connection in ‘Le Jet d’eau’. The opening scoring of ‘Recueillement’ seemed again to come from a Wagnerian world, violas, cellos, and harps, paving the way for woodwind and voice to combine in flesh and desire for its transcendence.
Baudelaire spanned the interval, twinned in the second half with Berg for Der Wein, which many will know from Boulez’s recording with Jessye Norman. Pelléas-malevolence persisted and mutated in the first poem, ‘Die Seele des Weines’, all the more so given Wigglesworth’s deliberate tempo. The opening, wandering bass line sounded as if Fafner had made his way onto the stage as Lulu’s new amant. (There is an idea for an opera—or perhaps not.) This was a rich vinous soul indeed, redolent of the French Wagnerism of a subsequent generation to the poet: the Revue wagnérienne, perhaps. Bevan once more span the line and worked the text with alchemy inherent in a fine vantage, matched note for note by the BBC SO. A riotous opening to the central ‘Der Wein der Liebenden’ subsided to suggest a world, as it is, very much post-Das Lied von der Erde, which persisted to a dark, yet ambiguous climax in ‘Der Wein des Einsamen’.
Back to Debussy to close, for Nocturnes, colours variegated to permit, if not quite every shade between rare primaries, then a good few nevertheless. Enchantment and ambiguity characterised ‘Nuages’, its musical parameters kept in fruitful, shifting balance. Allemonde malevolence gave way, at least momentarily, to fluted rays of sun. Colour was well and truly switched on for ‘Fêtes’, over which a celebrated maître had left an unforgettable visual and musical BBC performance to haunt memories and even proceedings. Wigglesworth was not inflexible, by any means, but rather ensured that relative flexibility was always directed towards a goal. Even in the Barbican, whose acoustic can hardly be accused of accentuating the mysterious, ‘Sirènes’ offered a more distant form of seduction than Der Wein. It flowed beautifully, and not without a little menace, in a full-blooded account from orchestra and voices alike. This was not a Debussy painted in pastel shades; it sounded all the better for that.
