London Sinfonietta/Kemp - Boulez and Cage, 9 March 2025

Purcell Room

Cage: Six Melodies
Boulez: Improvisé—pour le Dr. K
Cage: Credo in US
Boulez: Dérive 1
Boulez: Domaines
Cage: Variations I

Francesca Amewudah-Rivers (actor)

Michael McCarthy (director)

Mark van de Wiel (clarinet)

Sarah Nicolls (prepared piano)

London Sinfonietta

Thomas Kemp (conductor)

Images: Monika S Jakubowska

This London Sinfonietta concert, ‘innovative’ in the best rather than the debased, trivial way, framed performances of works by Pierre Boulez and John Cage with engaging readings from their correspondence by Francesca Amewudah-Rivers and short filmed contributions. It made for an enthralling and enjoyable evening at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room, precisely because the level of performance was so high, ‘additions’, though they were far more than that, genuinely complementing rather than substituting for musical excellence. It was a delight, moreover, to see a sold-out venue, once again giving the lie to claims that no one is interested in hearing this music. Many of us have a deep thirst for it; the only reason we do not go more often is a lack of opportunities to do so. Many do not, just as many do not like all manner of things, whether Mozart, Beethoven, the Beatles, or anything else; there is no reason to be dishonest and substitute one’s own preferences and interests for the voice of the world-spirit. And there is every reason to welcome an all-too-rare opportunity to hear, rather than simply talk about, this music, especially in so illuminating a juxtaposition, which offered great musical contrasts as well as points of mutual historical fascination. 

The first reading came not from the correspondence as such, although it is included in the Cambridge University Press Nattiez-Samuels edition as its first item. It was instead taken from Boulez’s 1949 spoken introduction – both manuscript and a rough draft are part of the Paul Sacher Stiftung – to the performance he helped organise of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, given at Suzanne Tézanas’s Paris salon. A brief filmed excerpt was juxtaposed with a live excerpt from Boulez’s own Second Piano Sonata of the previous year. Different worlds indeed, though the excerpted correspondence that followed suggested genuine interest in mutual exploration too, Boulez’s apology for sometimes writing in French – ‘my [English] grammar is still too shaky’ (3/11/12 January 1950) – typical of a humility for which he is still too infrequently credited. 

Cage’s Six Melodies for violin and keyboard (piano) from this same year were given a delightful performance by Clio Gould and Elizabeth Burley, the rhythmic progression Boulez admired strongly yet far from didactically to the fore. Initially un-, even anti-‘violinistic’, the music seemed to grow both as music and as violin music, the third and fourth pieces in particular splendidly ‘fiddling’. It felt like a gateway to the meditative sensibility as well as to the chance operations that would increasingly characterise Cage’s music in the years to follow. Boulez’s 2005 revision of his 1969 tribute for the eightieth birthday of Aldred A. Kalmus of Universal Edition, Improvisé—pour le Dr. K, opened with typical piano éclat. A very strong initial sense of Schoenberg – and he is there somewhere – faded slightly when I realised: ‘of course: like the other Kalmus pieces, this was written for the Pierrot ensemble’. Flute trills and their generative tendency seemed prophetic of later explorations, not least … explosante-fixe …, though its progress was very different. It was over in a flash, as ever leaving one wishing for more. 

A clip from the film Works of Calder, also from 1950, followed, including Cage’s music: ‘the first time I have felt the music to be necessary to a film’ (Boulez, 30 December 1950). Although Cage’s Credo in US was written earlier (1942) it seemed here to pre-empt the composer’s growing interest in chance operations through its use of radio music. Rhythm and sounds of percussion were truly infectious, leading up, so it seemed, to those Sonatas and Interludes. Boulez’s Dérive 1 (1984) offered more contrast than complement, though was no less welcome for that; it seemed to take up the baton from his earlier piece, the SACHER reference’s generative quality seductively palpable. Febrile, ever-transforming, a feast of Messiaenic colour, it spoke of and through Debussy rather than Cage’s Satie, and in its woodwind arabesques, similarly proclaimed a Stravinskian inheritance thoroughly internalised and transformed. 

Mark van de Wiel’s performance of the solo version of Domaines (1961-8) proved a stunning tour de force. Whatever Boulez’s intention, the element of choice and mobility, the clarinettist selecting the order in which the pages, each on a different stand, are played, brings an inescapable element of what soon would be called music theatre to proceedings, the performer’s one-man show extended to two, counting his instrument. Apart from – though who could it be apart from? – van de Wiel’s equally outstanding virtuosity and musical understanding, one of Boulez’s triumphant reinstatements of the performer, what truly stood out was an almost Wagnerian unendliche Melodie. One felt vividly as well as merely heard the procedures at work in all parameters, attack included, in the longest of constructed lines.   

Is Cage’s layering of transparencies in Variations I (1958) – to be performed by any number of performers on any instruments and any number thereof – more radical? Perhaps. Less ’Western’? Perhaps. Less ‘musical’? Perhaps. Given the presentation, it is hardly unreasonable to have felt led to ask such questions. Again, though, it was the contrast brought by something no less triumphantly ‘itself’ that was truly the thing. It brought with it a breath of the fresh air many felt Cage had imparted to Darmstadt.

Gould/London Sinfonietta/RAM Manson Ensemble/Lischke - Boulez and Stockhausen, 5 December 2015

Royal Festival Hall

Boulez – Dérive 1

Boulez – Anthèmes 2
Stockhausen – Hymnen: Region III

Clio Gould (violin)

Sound Intermedia

Royal Academy of Music Manson Ensemble

London Sinfonietta

Wolfgang Lischke (conductor)

 

It is with great sadness that I find this Boulez anniversary year drawing to a close. What a year it has been, with magnificent performances of the composer’s œuvre across Europe (it would seem far less so in the United States, the New York Philharmonic’s silence unforgivable). Those wishing to programme Boulez’s music should now have every justification they need: a wealth of performers possessed of both passion and excellence, and large audiences, hungry to hear more. (That goes for so much post-war New Music, which, bizarrely, I suppose we can still just about call this repertoire.) Yet I fear that silence will resume come 2016, the most reactionary in the audience – who, for some reason, seem always to have most say – breathing a sigh of relief that they can safely return to wall-to-wall Rachmaninov.

 

Let us hope not and let us do what we can to ensure not. The London Sinfonietta’s performances here were as excellent as one might have expected, arguably still more so. Not least of my musical epiphanies this year was the moment when Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra finally had Dérive 2 click into place for me. What had puzzled me – and what some friends had disdained as unworthy of the composer – stood revealed as the masterpiece Barenboim had claimed. Dérive 1, which I do not think I have heard performed this year otherwise, worked beautifully as an ‘overture’. Boulez’s writing, the Sinfonietta’s playing, and Wolfgang Lischke’s finely-judged direction drew one in: had one lose oneself again in material from Répons and Messagesquisse. What one might, I suppose, call developing variation – Boulez’s fabled Brahms-scepticism notwithstanding – manifested itself with equal clarity and warmth, almost as if we were hearing it from the composer himself. The six chords ‘derived’ from SACHER worked their magic: melodic, harmonic, structural. One felt – as well as knew intellectually – the processes, in an intriguing dialectic between Stravinskian clarity and Debussyan ambiguity, at work, and longed for more, indeed for Dérive 2.

 

Clio Gould’s performance of Anthèmes 2 with the ever-excellent Sound Intermedia was quite outstanding, immediately rendering irrelevant any doubts about the suitability of the venue. Again – and perhaps this was a consequence of a good few performance opportunities throughout the year – connections with other works manifested themselves, but they were of secondary importance when compared with the confidence, virtuosity, and musicality with which Gould performed this indispensable work. It sounded and resounded with all the musical drama and depth of a solo violin work by Bach. In fact, the great D minor Chaconne came to my mind, relevantly or otherwise, as an unacknowledged progenitor. Light and shadow, concision and proliferation, harmony and counterpoint intellectual and emotional drama: all of these and many more combined in ways that seemed created almost on the spot, in order to offer the most ‘compleat’ performance I have heard of the work. The humorous, throw-away ending remains as splendid as ever.

 

Stockhausen probably does even less well than Boulez in performing terms. The last big opportunity I had was the unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime (I fear!) production of Mittwoch in Birmingham. Opera companies across the world should unite, having nothing to lose but their insipid – at best – bel canto chains; instead, Licht languishes unperformed as a whole, anywhere, ever. With this performance of Region III from Hymnen, we heard and again felt just a little of what we were missing. I must admit that I will sometimes approach some of Stockhausen’s pronouncements on his music with a little scepticism. (Surely not?!) However, words from the composer on process and on what I think we can call meaning, words I only read afterwards, seemed to me very much to tally with another fine performance, members of the London Sinfonietta now joined by inspired and inspiring musicians from the Royal Academy of Music Manson Ensemble. ‘National anthems,’ Stockhausen claimed, are the most familiar music imaginable. … When familiar music is integrated into a composition of unknown, new music, it is possible,’ and here it certainly seemed accomplished, ‘to hear especially well how it was integrated: untransformed, more or less transformed, transposed or modulated. The more self-evident the what, the more attentive one becomes to the how.’ (Think, for instance, of Webern’s and Schoenberg’s Bach transcriptions.) Yet, equally importantly, ‘national anthems are more than national anthems; they are “charged” with time, with history – with past, present and future. They accentuate the subjectivity of people in a time when uniformity is all too often mistaken for universality.’ An intriguing, provocative thought, but not just a thought: there seemed in performance to be genuine experience, through those musical processes, of that thought. Objets trouvés took on or, better, continued lives of their own, somewhere in between integration and transformation. We asked what their relationship to us was, had been, might yet be. Insofar as I could tell, the musicians seemed to responding aurally as well as to what was written for them; I do not know the work well enough to be sure. What I can be sure of is that the performance convinced me, and again left me wanting to hear more. Next time, let us hope, more than a single Region, but many thanks indeed are due to the London Sinfonietta for this opportunity, splendidly taken!

The Stockhausen performance was recorded by BBC Radio 3 to form part of its broadcast quadrophonic sound premiere of Hymnen on New Year’s Day, 2016. It is described as being part of its ‘New Year New Music focus’; I suppose we should disregard the unloveliness of the phrase and be grateful that Radio 3 still broadcasts such music at all.

 

Exquisite Labyrinth: The Music of Pierre Boulez, Southbank Centre

It would be remiss, to put it mildly, were this of all blogs not to cover the Southbank Centre's coming celebration of the music of Pierre Boulez. Have no fear: I shall be reporting from all of the events. (Click here for a full programme.) The Southbank Centre has been in touch with a podcast heralding what is to come, with contributions from Gillian Moore, Pierre-Laurent Aimard (the series curator), Nico Muhly, and Clio Gould:

Exquisite Labyrinth: The Music of Pierre Boulez by southbankcentre

See also this and many other postings from Classical Iconcolast (here).

Arensky Chamber Orchestra/Gould - Rautavaara, Grieg, Vivaldi, and Schnelzer

Cadogan Hall

Rautavaara – Pelimannit (‘The Fiddlers’), op.1
Grieg – From Holberg’s Time: Suite in the Olden Style, op.40
Vivaldi – Violin Concerto in D major, ‘Il Grosso Mogul,’ RV 208
Albert Schnelzer – Emperor Akbar (British premiere, orchestral version)

Arensky Chamber Orchestra
Clio Gould (violin, director)


Last September, I reported enthusiastically from the Arensky Chamber Orchestra’s launch at the Institute of Directors. I am delighted to say that this concert’s performances proved of an equally high standard. A crack team of young soloists combined under the leadership of Clio Gould to provide an object lesson in stylish, dynamic string playing.

To stand out amongst a host of chamber ensembles, the ACO has resolved to do things differently, not for the mere sake of it, but to attempt to present works in interesting new ways, both through programming and presentation. Interesting connections abounded: Scandinavian string music from Einojuhani Raatavaara, Edvard Grieg, and Swedish composer, Albert Schnelzer, the string orchestral version of the latter’s Emperor Akbar also fitting nicely with one of Vivaldi’s two Mogul excursions, the D major concerto, RV 208.

As we entered the Cadogan Hall, members of the orchestra greeted us from a balcony above the stage with their own arrangement of folk material collected by fiddler Samuel Rinda-Nickola (1763-1818), thus preparing us for Rautavaara’s The Fiddlers, which also makes use of Rinda-Nickola’s material. A student work, indeed his op.1, The Fiddlers (or ‘Pelimannit’) is full of exuberance; at least it was in this typically energetic performance. The informative programme notes informed us that Rautavaara originally wrote a piano piece, which he subsequently arranged for string orchestra. From the idiomatic rendition here, one would never have guessed, though the composer perhaps sounds closer to the likes of Honegger than to his later self (no complaints here). Depth and richness of tone combined with sharp characterisation of individual movements, relishing but never unduly exaggerating the composer’s ‘wrong-note’ harmonies, to provide a memorable account. Another programming idea: perhaps a potential companion piece to Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s riotous Rheinische Kirmestänze?




Grieg’s Holberg Suite followed: another work originally composed for piano and subsequently arranged for string orchestra. It is an unfashionable work; indeed, one might say much the same of Grieg as a composer: a pity, since its evocation of the Baroque suite is charming and never resorts to pastiche. Lightly nostalgic, the ACO’s account paid homage to an imagined eighteenth century, whilst making abundantly clear that this was a nineteenth-century work. Grieg’s harmonies delighted, not least on account of well-judged harmonic rhythm under Gould’s wise direction. String tone itself was expressively rich, though never overwhelmingly so: light and rich are not necessarily antonyms. The Air (‘Andante religioso’) was sung especially beautifully, never descending into the realms of the maudlin. Gould’s solos proved beguiling, but so did those from other section principals, amongst whom Steffan Rees’s finely shaded cello line deserves especial mention.

Gould was the soloist for Vivaldi’s Il grosso mogul concerto. I cannot claim to be a paid-up Vivaldian – Dallapiccolla’s line, popularised by Stravinsky, about writing the same concerto a few hundred times dies hard – but this was a fine reading that never outstayed its welcome. Once again striking was the richness, though not a ‘Romantic’ richness, of tone displayed by the orchestra as a whole, a fine backdrop for Vivaldi’s – and Gould’s – flights of violinistic fantasy. The slow movement, for solo and continuo, showed that there is variety within Vivaldi’s box of tricks, even if I could not help – heretically? – thinking that Bach’s arrangement remains superior to the original. But what a joy it was to hear such warmth from the orchestra: utterly distant from current attention-seeking ‘authenticity’. I was put in mind of the English Chamber Orchestra in its heyday.

Finally came the British premiere of the orchestral version of Albert Schnelzer’s Emperor Akbar, its quartet version written for the Brodsky Quartet. Where the inspiration for Vivaldi’s title remains obscure, Schnelzer pays explicit homage to Salman Rushdie’s portrait of the Mogul Emperor in The Enchantress of Florence. Indeed, we heard readings from Rushdie prior to both the Vivaldi and Schnelzer pieces. Schnelzer, according to his biography ‘has openly declared that communication is a key element in his music.’ I am not sure that there is anything particularly unusual about that, though the implication would seem to be that (relatively) straightforward is better. The dance-inspired rhythms and melodies were once again expertly despatched by the orchestra, though I could not help wishing that something a little more intellectually engaging were on offer. Ferneyhough perhaps: I suspect these players would cope…

The next ACO concert will feature Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, both in its original sextet version, alongside an exhibition of new works from the Royal College of Art, and in the version for string orchestra. Perhaps my belief in the original’s superiority will be challenged; we shall see… For further details on the Arensky Chamber Orchestra, please visit the orchestra’s website (click here).