Milton Court Concert Hall and Barbican Hall
Domaines for solo clarinet
Piano Sonata no.2
Dialogue de l’ombre double
Deux Études de musique concrète
Douze Notations
Incises
Cummings ist der Dichter
Pli selon Pli
Beñat Erro Díez, Lily Payne (clarinets)
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| Images: BBC/Mark Allan |
Boulez at 100. It does not seem long since we were celebrating his 90th here at the Barbican, with another BBC Total Immersion Day, likewise culminating in Pli selon pli, from Yeree Suh, Thierry Fischer, and (neither for the first nor the last time) the BBC Symphony Orchestra. It even does not seem so very long since, as a student, I came down to London to hear Boulez himself conduct the work at the Festival Hall for his 75th. Strangely, it very much does seem like another world thinking back just five years earlier, to when I bought my first Boulez CD, having heard on Radio 3’s Building a Library the first movement of his now legendary Mahler Sixth with the Vienna Philharmonic and rushed out to spend a good few pennies I barely had, knowing this was something I must hear and have. It remains the recording closest to my heart (and mind) of the Mahler symphony closest to my heart (and mind). Given Boulez’s long association with the BBC, it was fitting and enlightening to begin the day with a cinema showing, first of a deftly assembled compendium of BBC material, presentationally fronted and fused with typical verve and light-worn learning by Tom Service, followed by a film from the late, greatly lamented Barrie Gavin.
A quick break for lunch was followed by an
equally fitting and enlightening panel, chaired by Jonathan Cross, discussing Boulez
at the BBC, musicians (harpist Sioned Williams and Daniel Meyer) and former
Controller Nicholas Kenyon sharing memories, experience, and acute critical
ears for what made those years so extraordinary and some aspects of their
legacy. Every path to what increasingly seems to have assumed, Répons
and Le Marteau sans maître notwithstanding, the stature of Boulez the
composer’s popular masterwork – in its final form, it is unmistakeably
finished, or at least seems so – will be different. This was no exception, but
there was, even before the event, a sense of heading in that direction:
appropriately enough from all directions, temporal and other. In a nod to his
work with young musicians – we saw and heard tantalising excerpts from his
National Youth Orchestra Gurrelieder on both films – and a statement of
belief in the future of his music and his vision, we moved to Milton Court for
a concert involving Guildhall School musicians, two clarinet works sandwiching
the Second Piano Sonata, pli selon pli. Tamara Stefanovich, who has very
recently issued her recording of the work, heroically stepped in at the
shortest of notice for an indisposed Guildhall student, to add to a not
inconsiderable workload later in the day (and a demanding programme, Structures
II included, the previous night in Cologne).
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We had heard Domaines but three weeks earlier in London, in a London Sinfonietta programme juxtaposing Boulez and Cage. Lily Payne’s performance had little to fear even from such an exalted comparison (Mark van de Wiel). Indeed, save for the different layout, music stands arranged in a line, aptly highlighting symmetry (Original-Miroir) rather than the circular (centrifugal) approach spatialised at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, thoughts did not turn at all to comparison. One concentrated, rather, on the here and now. Crystal clear in the Milton Court acoustic, it was as beautiful as it was meaningful, line spun, indeed created, with seemingly infinite variegation.
As it triumphantly reinstated the role of performance and the performer in Boulez’s music, so did Dialogue de l’ombre double from Beñat Erro Díez and his taped self (with Hannah Miller as recording engineer, and a little help from piano resonance too). Lights off signalled a distinctly later proliferation of sound in the shadow not only of the clarinet (and clarinettist) but of Répons too. It was a wondrously ‘achieved’ experience, both as work and performance, clarity of line, however complex, as strongly to the fore as in Domaines. Boulez’s ‘invisible theatre’ seemed born as much of Wagner as of Claudel, the magic of Bayreuth reborn in a strikingly different environment—ironically, perhaps, given his own lament that Wagner’s theatrical innovations had been so resolutely ignored by the actually existing theatrical ‘business’ of the opera houses whose destruction he (as Wagner) had once suggested. Here, perhaps, was the Boulez opera we never had, in darkness, light, and shadows.
This was a welcome reminder from both clarinettists that, for young players, Boulez’s music is first and foremost music, not an object of controversy. It never really was for my generation either; we all knew, which doubtless separates us from those who truly had to fight (in that case either), though we surely must continue to fight for it to be heard, given the ever-more-deplorable cultural reaction around us. It makes little sense, in any case, for young musicians to declare ‘Boulez est mort’. They relish its challenges, which will remain in one form or another, just as those of Bach and Beethoven do, but their essence will change, as Boulez takes his place in his own fabled ‘Museum’ of musical history. The Royal Academy of Music’s performance of sur Incises a few nights earlier, on Boulez’s birthday itself, was by all accounts a splendid, enriching experience for all concerned. It stands now at the heart of the repertoire of Berlin’s Boulez Ensemble, founded by Daniel Barenboim. There is cultural reaction, yes, as there is political reaction, but there is also hope.
As indeed there was in Stefanovich’s spectacular performance of the Sonata. I have a confession to make here. When I first heard the pianist perform it, I was too much in thrall to my won preconceptions of what it ‘should’ sound like. It was not even that I did not ‘like’ it; I did, very much, but part of me, brought up above all on Maurizio Pollini, unconsciously wondered whether I ‘should’, when it sounded so very different. Memories of that 2015 encounter remained with me, though, marinating in the ombre of conscious and unconscious alike, and I slowly realised it had begun to change my understanding of the work and its possibilities. What a joy, then, to celebrate the composer’s centenary not only with a new recording, but with so magnificent and, in the circumstances, unexpected a performance, which spoke of Boulez’s own advice to Stefanovich to think of reaching into a beehive.
The first movement ignited and transformed those memories, revealing a far more ‘universal’, less specifically ‘French’ Boulez, its molten lava that of the composer’s fire-breathing youth, its logic all the more clearly post-Schoenbergian. In fidelity was born the most personal expression, Boulez’s claim that he would be the first composer without a biography almost touchingly forlorn. The tumult of a trill, the momentum of a repeated note, the terror of a silence: all these and more were not only to be heard but to be felt in a rich slow movement that celebrated parenthesis yet nonetheless ‘cohered’, not entirely unlike late Beethoven (as well as quite unlike it). The scherzo’s making music through intervallic and other parameters fused through astonishing willpower a marriage of Debussy and Webern we only take for granted now on Boulez’s account. It gazed into the abyss and something – reflection, shadows, something else? – stared back. The fourth movement unleashed a very particular character, again from within, exultant in its Artaud-inspired cruelty, Beethoven annihilated and yet in some sense reborn, like Boulez himself in its after-shock.
Further discussion, led by Kate Molleson, Jonathan Cross joined by Gillian Moore, a longstanding, leading figure in Boulez’s later London appearances, offered a substantial, duly provocative apéritif for the evening concert. It also reminded us just how much London and the world’s appetite for such enrichment activities owed to Boulez’s own example. I myself learned more from his own pre-concert discussions than from a host of other concerts, even festivals. There would doubtless have been other paths and they can be interesting to speculate about. ‘Virtual’ history can have its own, well, virtues, in helping us refine understanding of what did happen. But Boulez, IRCAM, and more did, just as Beethoven, Wagner, and Mahler did. We were reminded, quite properly, of more awkward encounters and memories too. Was Boulez’s return to France at the expense of figures such as Xenakis? Perhaps. There is always danger in schematicism, although in practice that is more likely to come from the derrière than the avant garde (and despite the arrant nonsense one hears from some, even now, on Boulez and William Glock).
Heard partly in that light, the opening number in the Barbican concert reminded
us of a path Boulez did not really take, though it was perhaps not entirely
without issue in later encounters with tape and indeed live electronics. Two 1951-2
Études for tape suggested to Boulez above all the limitations of
existing technology, as well as ‘Pierre Schaeffer’s “do-it-yourself” studio
methods,’ to quote Caroline Potter’s informative programme note. There is
always, at least for me, the oddity of hearing purely electronic music, without
performers, in a concert setting. How will, even should, the audience react?
Here in awkward silence, before Stefanovich returned for more piano music. It
was a fascinating opportunity nonetheless to hear these serial manipulations of
percussion sounds from the eve of Le Marteau sans maître. Whether
intended whimsically or not – I doubt it, at least consciously – there was a
winning air of that spirit, which certainly characterised some of Boulez’s
difficult diplomacy with musicians and institutions, as we had heard in the first
of the two talks.
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Stefanovich renewed and extended our appreciation of Boulez the composer for piano. Dull souls will claim the earlier Boulez was the ‘real’ Boulez, or some such nonsense. They are perfectly entitled to their preferences; we all are. But if you cannot hear wonders in Incises and indeed sur Incises, to your taste or otherwise, just as you can in the Second Sonata, you are probably not hearing them in either. It was unmistakeably later, though far from late, Boulez—just as Dialogue de l’ombre double had been. The toccata-quality of the score was immediate, immanent even, in a scintillating journey suggestive also of earlier piano fantasias, Bach and beyond, and every bit as protean as the Sonata, just differently so. The twelve Notations that preceded it enabled us to hear another, similarly absorbing example of post-Romanticism, the bagatelle spirit of late Beethoven reborn and reheard via Bartók, Schoenberg, Messiaen, and others. The dialectic between mystery (IX) and mechanism (X) penetrated, both in work and performance, to the heart of the whole.
It would, given their long, incredibly productive association with Boulez, have been a great pity not to hear from the BBC Singers on such a day. That we can do so at all is, of course, no thanks to the corporation itself; for now, let us give thanks that we can, whilst remembering how strong the forces Boulez and so many others, aesthetic foes included, have had to fight against. Joining Martyn Brabbins and the BBC SO, their pinpoint precision was, in proper Boulezian style, never an end in itself, but rather the foundation of a exquisite, multi-directional (in that centrifugal, serialist and post-serialist sense) account of Cummings ist der Dichter. Warmth, as in Boulez’s own later performances of his music, was a hallmark, so was a hyper-expressivity that surely had its roots in Schoenberg as much as Webern, Debussy too. Given in a single, endlessly variegated whole, this offered opera-less drama that emerged almost like a tapestry that spoke and sang: a fusion, if you like, of Boulez’s earlier dark surrealism and his late fascination with Szymanowski, seeds of which one could imagine one heard here.
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And so, to Pli selon pli. Memories, whether of that earlier Second Sonata performance or of other readings of this ‘portrait of Mallarmé’, are necessarily part of our experience. ‘Must I once again sing the praises of amnesia?’ Boulez once asked, and the answer in context – out of which the rhetorical question has too often been shamelessly extracted – is of course yes. Memories will never be obliterated, but they can too readily become Mahlerian ‘tradition’ as Schlamperei, to invoke once more one of Boulez’s most illustrious composer-conductor predecessors. This performance, from Anna Dennis, the BBC SO, and Brabbins, seemed to me the equal of any I have heard, probably surpassing that of ten years ago, even approaching the fina lencounter I heard from Boulez himself, in 2011 conducting Barbara Hannigan. That is not really the point, though. The past cannot be obliterated, nor did one of the most penetrating of all conductors of works from the ‘Museum’ ever think or wish it to be. He simply wished us to turn attention to the present – even the ‘present’ of the Museum’ – as we could and did here.
The opening of ‘Don’ issued an invitation to enter that none could refuse, trademark éclat followed by the seduction (and seductive birth!) of a ‘nuit d’Idumée’. Beautifully voiced and connected, this was a performance led by a conductor who, in quiet, unflashy security not unlike that of Boulez, showed that he ‘got it’, that he could and would be our guide to the work’s unfolding. Nowadays particularly, we hear much other music folding in but this is infinitely more than synthesis; it is a personal ‘voice’ that yet extends far beyond mere ‘personality’. Mesmerising in Mozartian qualities that already announced a period of ‘modern classicism’ (Arnold Whittall) in Boulezian works, in its seduction it no more brooked dissent than Così fan tutte (or Szymanowski). We had entered a Bergian labyrinth and never wished to leave.
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The first of the three central ‘Improvisations’ brought Webern and Debussy more evidently to the fore, but intriguingly also the very idea of a composed improvisation, recreated before our ears. In a sense, that is simply ‘performance’, though one can too readily lose sight of that, especially in an age still haunted by the ‘authenticity’ Boulez abhorred. Dennis’s way with the words was all: their sound as much as alleged ‘meaning’. As humans, we naturally wish to interpret, but sometimes we need simply to enjoy too. The wide range of her line and performance in a magical second ‘Improvisation’ (‘Une dentelle s’abolit’) seemed both to incite and be incited by the orchestral tapestry woven and re-woven around her—and us. Was that an echo of Prélude à l’après-midi I heard in the third? Perhaps—and perhaps it pointed to another fold to incorporate. There is no single ‘right’ answer, nor ever could there be. That sonic recreation of textures before ears and minds alike was the thing—and what a thing. Webern’s influence so thoroughly assimilated one barely noticed, until one did, both in and across the orchestra. It also felt haunted by the vocal and instrumental laboratory of Bach’s cantatas, a world that also exerted great fascination for Boulez, though, in a further indictment of current compartmentalisation of musical life and history, seldom do we hear about it.
This, then, was a world of ever-shifting, ever-transforming folds of silk, transposed into music—and/or vice versa. Its culmination in ‘Tombeau’ was the culmination of an intense orchestral drama with voice: that invisible theatre once again, conceived before Boulez’s incursions into the operatic world, revised after them. Maybe it was the chance connection of the moment, yet Pelléas and Parsifal seemed more than usually present. There will always be ghosts at any musical feast, not least Boulez’s own. Not the least of this performance’s wonders was both to hear and to feel how his music is now taking on new directions in his absence. Boulez est mort; vive Boulez.
