Prom 65 - Conquer/BBC Singers/EIC/Brönnimann: Bartók, Boulez, and Carter, 2 September 2016

Royal Albert Hall

Bartók – Three Village Scenes

Boulez – Anthèmes 2
Carter – Penthode
Boulez – cummings ist der Dichter

Jeanne-Marie Conquer (violin)

Andrew Gerzso (IRCAM computer music design)

Carlo Laurenzi (IRCAM computer music production)

Jérémie Henrot (IRCAM sound engineer)

BBC Singers

Ensemble Intercontemporain

Baldur Brönnimann (conductor)

2016 opened with the death of Pierre Boulez; alas, it has only got worse. One might have wished for more from the Proms, at which he conducted about seventy concerts, from 1965 to 2008: a much-needed London Répons, for instance. Let us not, however, be ungracious; this was nevertheless a moving and necessary tribute. It was, moreover, definitely a tribute to Boulez at the Proms, both as conductor and composer.

Bartók always featured heavily in his programming, here and elsewhere; indeed, out of the three previous performances of the Three Village Scenes at the Proms, two, in 1974 (the first ever) and in 1979, the latter with the newly formed Ensemble Intercontemporain, were conducted by him. It is always a great pleasure to welcome the EIC to London. Does it ever give a less than excellent performance? That was certainly not a question that occurred this evening, under Baldur Brönnimann, even if I wondered whether the frenetic passages in the opening ‘Svatba’ (‘Wedding’) were a little too driven. Perhaps it was just the acoustic, or the time needed to come to terms with it. At any rate, the contrast with the broader, weightier passages was stark. The second scene, ‘Ukoliebavka’ (‘Lullaby’) sounded as a lullaby indeed, but not an easy one. Languor, whether from the instrumental ensemble or the female voices of the BBC Singers, was always shot through with unease, even urgency. Woodwind echoes of Bluebeard’s Castle – a work I heard Boulez conduct both here and elsewhere – proved as mesmerising in their way as the ‘real thing’. Echoes of Les Noces, another favourite Boulez work, were clear throughout too, nowhere more so than in the ‘Tanec mládencov’ (‘Lads’ Dance’). It was raucous, yet controlled: art music, not folk music, and rightly so. Precision and spirit, rhythm and harmony: all contributed, as they might have done under Boulez himself, to a splendid performance.

 

Anthèmes 2 was heard here in 2012, as part of Daniel Barenboim’s Beethoven and Boulez series. The violin soloist was then Michael Barenboim; here, Jeanne-Marie Conquer proved an excellent, perhaps even superior, successor. The Royal Albert Hall truly came into its own, as much a partner, so it seemed, as the ever-excellent IRCAM sound team. A truly spatial work emerged, a successor as much to Gabrieli as to Stockhausen in that sense; above all, however, this was a performance whose material and its proliferation could only have been that of one composer. At times, we heard a celestial band of violins in sweet harmony across the hall; at others, we heard individual responses from a host of individual pizzicato strings (or so, of course, it seemed), ricocheting in endless variety, endless variegation, serial processes rendered as immediate, as immanent as anyone might imagine. New vistas opened up, the timbral equivalent of one of those moments in a Mahler symphony. Bach’s example seemed perhaps unusually present, but so did difference from that (unacknowledged?) model, that figure we know and love from ‘…explosante-fixe’ taking on roles both familiar and new (even to those of us who thought we knew the work quite well). ‘Mesmerising’ again seemed the word.

 

Boulez and the EIC gave the premiere of Elliott Carter’s Penthode at the Proms in 1985. It does not, sad to say, seem to have been performed there since; it was certainly the first time I had heard the work live. What a work it is, though, and what a performance it received too! The opening viola solo, gorgeously played, sounded almost Bergian in its inspiration, its melodic path, even some of its harmonic implications; likewise when the violin took over, only underlining a perhaps surprising closeness to the world of Berg’s Violin Concerto. As in a work by Boulez, the line was in a state of constant development, the mode of development itself constantly developing. Energy might have been less overtly to the fore than in some of Carter’s works, but was no less crucial, if anything more so, in what I sometimes thought of as a state of rapt development. It was not unlike, if you will forgive me the fancy, a great Beethoven Adagio, in which variegated (Carter’s equivalent to Boulez’s ‘proliferating’?) material above wove its particular magic, yet remained, however intangibly, dependent upon the slower movement – a geological metaphor did not seem inappropriate – below, movement that remained, one felt, in some sense fundamental. I wished it might have gone on longer, even forever.

 

Likewise with Boulez’s cummings ist der Dichter, for which the BBC Singers, this time male and female, returned to the stage: twenty-seven singers and twenty-seven instrumentalists, the three harps pointing to the future of sur Incises. Although it has featured four times at the Proms, the first time (1972) conducted by the composer, this was, I think, the first time I had heard the work in concert. Rectification of a rare omission was all the more welcome in so sensitive, so wondrously clear a performance. One is on dangerous ground, pointless ground perhaps, saying that the composer would surely have approved, but it was difficult not to do so, and surely harmless to think in such terms. I had the impression of a combination of certain qualities of Boulez’s earlier choral music – think of the ravishing world of Le Visage nuptial – with the different concerns of somewhat later musical language. Words were admirably clear, even when, especially when, broken up: it is not a Nono-like path that is followed. There was a true sense, nevertheless, of cummings-like wonder. The work sounded, if not unusually generative in its processes, than perhaps unusually traditional in the nature of those processes. Such things are highly relative, of course, but the impression of anchoring was not at all unwelcome. Brönnimann’s strong sense of direction was palpable, as was the security of every performer. Such qualities sounding as a given, a gorgeous tapestry indeed could be woven above, within, without, beneath. There were passages of relative stillness (again, relative), but there was always something brewing, somewhere. As with the preceding works, the scale, as well as the stature, of work and performance had little or no connection with its mere duration.

Aural Choreography and the Threshold: Boulez's Répons

Ensemble Intercontemporan and Matthias Pintscher after two performances of this work at the Salzburg Festival, 2015

 

(This essay was first published as a programme note for the Salzburg Festival, 2015)

In retrospect, and perhaps even at the time, Répons seems or seemed to mark a new phase in Pierre Boulez’s compositional activity. Long accused – unfairly and uncomprehendingly – of having taken refuge in his conducting activities, the composer, fresh from leading performances of the Ring in Bayreuth and the premiere of the three-act version of Berg’s Lulu in Paris, responded to a commission from South-West German Radio for the Donaueschingen Music Festival with this large-scale work for six soloists (cimbalom, first piano, xylophone/glockenspiel, harp, vibraphone, piano 2/synthesiser), sizeable chamber orchestra (two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, two violins, two violas, two cellos, double bass), and live electronics. (Not, of course, to forget the conductor!)

That first version, begun in 1980 and performed in 1981, was about seventeen minutes long; a version about twice the length was heard at the BBC Proms the following year; what we shall hear tonight (twice, in different seating arrangements, so as better to appreciate the work’s – and performance’s ‘aural choreography’) lasts almost three-quarters of an hour. It remains a work-in-progress, Boulez’s original ‘intention’, for whatever that might be worth, having been to create a work of full-concert length. The score as it stands, gives the date, tantalisingly as ‘1981/…’, and Boulez, in a 1988 interview Peter McCallum kept his counsel concerning ‘completion’: ‘Well, at one point, the work will be finished, but I don’t know when exactly.’ Ever one to seek literary parallels, he went on, ‘I compare it with Proust, whose novel just expanded and expanded. … I still have to add chapters, but at the same time, what is written is definitely written and will be part of the final work.’

Répons was also Boulez’s first work, arguably the first masterpiece by any composer, to be realised in the studios of IRCAM, the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music), which is itself far from the least of the composer-conductor-thinker-agitator’s achievements. Having been invited in 1970 by Georges Pompidou to create a centre for musical research and creation, that had been another of the urgent tasks triumphantly achieved during the 1970s, whilst Boulez’s detractors sniped at an alleged falling away from composition. 1981 marked, not coincidentally, both the Répons premiere and the full advent of the ‘4X System’, consisting of eight processor boards, each of which could independently be programmed to store, to manipulate, and to recall digitised sound waveforms, that is, as Boulez and his IRCAM collaborator, Andrew Gerzso explained, in a 1988 article on Répons, ‘sequences of numbers that correspond to the air-pressure fluctuations of a sound’. Also of crucial importance was the Matrix 32: ‘basically a programmable audio-signal traffic controller, routing audio signals from the soloists to the 4X and from the 4X to the speakers’.

It is worth quoting further from that article by Boulez and Gerzso, as a way in both to electronic music more generally, to this work in particular, and to this first, but not last, collaboration between the two (subsequent collaborations would be on Dialogue de l’ombre double,  …explosante-fixe…, and Anthèmes 2):

Composers have had essentially one medium through which to express their musical ideas in a form an audience can appreciate: the sounds that musicians can elicit from traditional instruments. With the advent of computers and other equipment for processing digital signals an entirely new means of musical expression has become available. A composer who applies these electronic devices is bounded only by imagination in creating an ‘orchestra’ of sounds.

Music that seeks to integrate computer-generated sounds with traditional instruments presents a great challenge to a composer. Not only must the composer express musical ideas convincingly but also he or she must do so in a manner that is readily translatable into both mediums. Moreover, the ideas must be resilient enough to be passed back and forth between the two mediums during the course of a performance. Otherwise the listener might wonder what role the computer was meant to have in relation to the other instruments and be puzzled (and perhaps even repelled) by the lack of coherence.

Exploring possible musical relations between computers and traditional instruments requires much communication between composers and those who design computer hardware and software. Through such collaboration, electronic devices can be constructed that serve the composer's immediate purpose while preserving enough generality and flexibility for future musical exploration – a task complicated by the fact that the composition's musical complexity is usually not commensurate with the technical complexity needed for its realisation. What appears to be a simple musical problem often defies an easy technological solution. Perhaps for the first time in history a composer has to explain and formalise the way he or she develops and manipulates concepts, themes and relations in a musical context in order for technicians (who may have little musical training) to bring them into existence. These are the kinds of problems we confront at … IRCAM.

 

Problems and opportunities, then – as ever, with technological advances in the history of music. It certainly did no harm, though, that Gerzso was – and is – certainly not a technician with ‘little musical training’, but rather a musician with a thorough grounding in both composition and, as flautist, performance. At present, he directs teaching at IRCAM, as well as coordinating interaction between the institute’s artistic and scientific activities. Experience of Répons, and the musical challenges it presented, will have done no harm in preparation for those roles, for it is equally crucial to note the challenge that musical problems issue to technology, as well as vice versa. ‘Coordination’ is perhaps the crucial word in the institute’s title, and is equally crucial to our understanding of Répons.

Let us turn more strictly to the work itself. Répons refers to ‘responses’, in this case to responsorial Gregorian Chant, precentor and choir in alternation. That sets up two relationships to be explored within the work: one between soloists and the instrumental equivalent here to the choir, and also the spatial element brought about by physical separation – and movement in space of the sounds heard. Boulez disavowed in that 1988 interview the spectacular for its own sake – one hears this also in, say, his supremely musical performance of a work such as Mahler’s Eighth Symphony – and said that what interested him was ‘this relationship between pitch, form, space, and time … which affects the very writing of the piece in every detail.’ And so, ‘the writing for the orchestra in the centre, for instance, is very different from the writing of [sic] the soloists at the perimeter, because – and this comes from my experience as a conductor – I know that when players are close to you they can follow your gestures immediately.’ 

One must have one’s wits about one to ‘follow’ the quasi-expository Introduction; yet, following everything in a single performance is no more possible than it is in Wagner. It is more advisable to inform oneself up to whatever point one wishes, and then to enjoy, to let the piece take one where it will. Entrance of electronics will inevitably direct aural – perhaps, visual – attention towards the periphery, the location of the soloists and speakers. (A ‘possible seating plan’ follows a compendious list of ‘Production equipment to be provided on site’ in the score.) Different instrumental attacks and decays in turn have different implications for sound transformation.

One example of maintenance of coherence between instrumental and electronic worlds, to which Gerzso draws attention in his booklet note for the CD release, is that of the soloists’ arpeggiated chords. As the soloists take their turns, so are the chords in turn transformed by electronics, ‘in such a way that the arpeggiated chords are themselves arpeggiated. The overall result of the soloists and the transformed sounds together is that of an arpeggio of an arpeggio of an arpeggio.’ Moreover, the pitches of the successive arpeggiated chords themsevles are all ultimately derived from a seven-note vibraphone chord, through familiar operations such as transposition and combination, each instrument taking from another and yet remaining in touch with the first. Oppositions multiply and, in a sense, attract. Meter returns, joining and indeed transforming his earlier works’ opposition between ‘smooth’ (chaotic and irregular) and ‘striated’ (regular, repeated notes) time; so does ‘symmetrical’ harmony. Ornamentation and proliferation – the SACHER hexachord ever in the background, not necessarily to be heard – abound.

Think again of that phrase ‘aural choreography’ – and there is surely ‘visual choreography’ in perusing the score alone. Though stereotype may still present Boulez in fierce, polemical, ‘Darmstadt’ mode, he has an exquisite sense of fantasy; indeed, he collaborated with the ‘equine choreographer’, Bartabas, on performance s of The Rite of Spring and Symphony of Psalms. More fundamentally, the spatial element is crucial, just as in Stockhausen’s Gruppen – another work now ‘traditionally’ performed twice – or in the Venetian works of Giovanni Gabrieli. Gerzso has rightly spoken of a ‘never ending mirror-effect’; electronic transformations respond to instrumental writing, and ‘a chain of answers crosses over to … [the domain] of electronic writing.’ It induces both anxiety and exhilaration that one will never quite hear the same performance, never quite hear the same ‘work’ twice; such is the essence of music as well as its history, in which Boulez more clearly than ever takes his rightful place.

 

That returns us to technology. Boulez largely kept his distance from earlier electronic music, suspicious of the inhibiting, even imprisoning, effect pre-recorded tapes had upon performance. We need not condescend toward, for instance, Luigi Nono’s  …sofferte onde serene…, nor indeed to Boulez’s own experiments of the 1950s; as we attain our distance from them, they too take their place in the mutable canon. However, the reassertion of performing contingency, enabled by the advent of ‘real-time’ transformation technology, heralds the late twentieth century’s most distinguished composer-conductor’s crucial first foray into this world. Selecting a single masterpiece from Boulez’s œuvre is as foolish as it would be for Mahler’s; Répons nevertheless looms over his subsequent work, just as Le Marteau sans maître had before. Répons has become, if not quite ‘the threshold’, as Boulez once said of Webern, then a crucially important staging-post in the history of modernist music.

Salzburg Festival (8): EIC/Pintscher - Boulez, Répons, 15 August 2015

Lehrbauhof

Répons (two performances)

Soloists:

Hidéki Nagano (piano)

Sébastien Vichard (piano)

Frédérique Cambreling (harp)

Luigi Gaggero (cimbalom)

Samuel Favre (vibraphone)

Gilles Durot (xylophone)

Ensemble Intercontemporain

Andrew Gerzso/Gilbert Nouno (IRCAM electronic realisation)

Matthias Pintscher (conductor) 

And so, the climax of my 2015 visit to Salzburg: my first ever hearing in the flesh of Répons. Sadly, I shall almost certainly never hear it conducted by the composer, save for on his Deutsche Grammophon recording (invaluable, but no replacement for the real thing). However, the superlative Ensemble Intercontemporain did Boulez as proud under Matthias Pintscher as I am sure they would have done the composer himself. To hear a work ‘live’ is always a different matter from hearing a recording, but a work in which spatial considerations are so crucial can only truly be heard like this. At any rate, the Salzburg Festival’s performances, in the Lehrbauhof, will surely be something I shall remember for the rest of my life. Every single performer struck me as contributing something nearly super-human. If I single none of them out, it is because my experience was such that it would be unfair to do so, not because they do not all deserve to be named.

As has often been the case, the work was performed twice. Each ticket had two different placements, enabling one to hear the work – and for once, this is no cliché – anew. Seated behind the orchestra (in section ‘D’) for the first half, I not only found the Introduction considerably sharper, also more ‘orchestral’ in the second half (section ‘A’), something which, I admit, might also have been simply a matter of a second hearing. As the work progressed, lines, sonorities, combinations emerged such as I truly do not think it would have been possible for me to have heard earlier. What also struck me forcefully was not only the – obvious, yet still interesting – thematic kinship with Dérive 2, of which I had had my ‘breakthrough’ hearing from the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and DanielBarenboim earlier in the week. The difference in compositional method and the multiplicity of possibilities, some realised, many more yet to be realised, were no matter of theoretical reflection, not that there is any reason to slight such activity; the seemingly endless possibilities inherent and immanent in the material lived, struggled, sometimes even won out in my ears and in my imagination. Or so I flattered myself – but I do not think that was mere idle self-flattery, for such was genuinely my experience as this rich aural tapestry was spun. (Mention of tapestry has me recall a fleeting thought that Boulez’s late enthusiasm for Szymanowski – he knew some before, I know, but did little about it – may have been ignited here. Fanciful, doubtless, but why not spin a few more connections?)

Drama, just as in, say, an excellent performance of Structures 2, was everywhere: almost as if it could be instantiated in several dimensions at once. (I realise I am speaking nonsense, at least according to one understanding, but nonsense sometimes has its uses.) The truth of Boulez’s claim that his later work would have been inconceivable without his conducting of Wagner and Mahler was triumphantly vindicated; this work-in-progress – we sometimes forget that she score as it stands gives the date, tantalisingly as ‘1981/…’ – is as much a successor to Wagnerian music dramas as Mahler’s symphonies are, albeit forcing open a material tendency to open-endedness that Wagner and Mahler are so adamant to close. On this occasion, Répons seemed emphatically to open a new chapter in the composer’s œuvre. Long accused – unfairly and uncomprehendingly – by those jealous of his extraordinary talent of having taken refuge in his conducting activities, the composer and his IRCAM collaborators, who should always be honoured in any discussion of this work, reimagines not only the relationship between instruments and electronics, but also, in dramatic instrumental form, the time-honoured liturgical responsorial relationship between precentor and choir. Hence the title. Here, lighting – a literally ‘electrical’ response, as it were, to the end of the quasi-expository Introduction, and the entrance of the soloists and electronics – played a structural-dramatic role, just as if we had an intelligent stage director or liturgist on hand.

One example of maintenance of coherence between instrumental and electronic worlds, to which Andrew Gerzso draws attention in his booklet note for the CD release, is that of the soloists’ arpeggiated chords. As the soloists take their turns, so are the chords in turn transformed by electronics, ‘in such a way that the arpeggiated chords are themselves arpeggiated. The overall result of the soloists and the transformed sounds together is that of an arpeggio of an arpeggio of an arpeggio.’ Moreover, the pitches of the successive arpeggiated chords themselves are all ultimately derived from a seven-note vibraphone chord, through familiar operations such as transposition and combination, each instrument taking from another and yet remaining in touch with the first. Oppositions multiply and, in a sense, attract. Meter returns, joining and indeed transforming his earlier works’ opposition between ‘smooth’ (chaotic and irregular) and ‘striated’ (regular, repeated notes) time; so does ‘symmetrical’ harmony. Ornamentation and proliferation – the [Paul] SACHER hexachord ever in the background, not necessarily to be heard – abound.

I quote myself (from the English-language programme note I wrote for this performance) in the preceding paragraph, not because I have run out of things to say. (Honestly!) I do so, because reading those words, that is, almost uncannily, precisely what I heard, albeit within a ‘live’, dramatic, experiential framework, which made the work sound both known and unknown. In the words of Hans Sachs, hero of a work Boulez long wished to conduct and yet which, alas, he never did, ‘Es klang so alt und war doch so neu!’ One will never quite hear the same work twice, of course, in any situation, but the open-endedness of something which yet emphatically remains a ‘musical work’ intensifies the exhilaration and the poignancy of the moment.