Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (3) – ‘Songs and Fragments’: Eight Songs for a Mad King and Kafka-Fragmente, 10 July 2024

Théâtre du Jeu de Paume

Man – Johannes Martin Kränzle
Woman – Anna Prohaska
Violinist – Patricia Kopatchinskaja

Director – Barrie Kosky

Design and lighting – Urs Schönebaum  

Ensemble Intercontemporain

Pierre Bleuse (conductor)

Images: Festival d'Aix-en-Provence 2024 © Monika Rittershaus

Virtuosity of the highest degree, entirely at the service of musical drama, characterised this Aix production under Barrie Kosky’s direction. Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King and György Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente formed a staged double bill, given without a break, at that eighteenth-century jewel among theatres, the Théâtre du Jeu de Paume. The ghost of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire haunted proceedings, audibly in the Davies’s music theatre monodrama, written for the composer’s own, Schoenberg-inspired Fires of London (here, Schoenberg’s ensemble plus percussion), and more scenically in the Kurtág fragments, not of course intended to be staged, but here given an intriguing new slant through the mediation of expressionist cabaret.   

Johannes Martin Kränzle’s assumption of the mad king – referred to in the cast list simply as ‘Un homme’, though it is of course George III – was something never to be forgotten. Quite how much was his, how much was Kosky’s, we shall never know—and why should we particular care? Theatre is collaborative, even in what might seem to be a one-man-show. With a single spotlight, a single unsparing spotlight, this poor (rich) man, clad only in sagging underpants, bared his soul to the birds, the audience, and indeed the musicians of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, incisively conducted by Pierre Bleuse, who in turn offered us their own, related musical tour of whimsy, parody, and brutal violence. From an early promenade, through the haunting of an imaginary yet ever-so-real queen ‘Esther’, via the king’s beloved Handel – with biting irony, ‘Comfort ye…’, to the final, shocking smashing of the violin, this was a psychological study, which in a sense revealed nothing other than itself, and thus in another sense proved all the more revealing. Through the countless ways he marshalled his voice and his entire body, Kränzle touched, amused, and horrified us. It was gripping, concentrated theatre, which one might well have wished to experience again, but knew one could not, even if the attempt had immediately been made. 

Anna Prohaska and Patricia Kopatchinskaja, minus the EIC, were our guides for Kurtág’s extraordinary set of miniatures. The violin provided, as it were the bridge: destroyed and now resurrected as a one-woman orchestra who was also a protagonist—and by her double-companion. Equality here, between two more consummate musicians and communicators seemed, by virtue of staging and performance, the former still astutely straightforward yet minutely observed, to be both immediately, immanently manifest and yet also maintained through ever-shifting dramatic power relationships: one conducting the other, one pulling the other’s strings, one inciting and consoling, and so on. Where Davies’s expressionist nightmare had stunned us into submission, here a different ghost of Pierrot – perhaps surprisingly given the more ‘abstract’ nature of the work – proved more founded in re-gendered harlequin character. We turned inwards, Kurtág’s Webern-like miniatures commanding and receiving absolute concentration, in more than one sense. Prohaska’s spellbinding performance – imagine having to sing that by heart, and engage in minutely planned physical performance too – was impossible to dissociate from Kopatchinskaja’s. The two musicians seemed almost to emerge as two emanations of the same soul. A response to their male counterpart in the first half, or something subtly yet, in that subtlety, defiantly different? Why choose? Again, there was so much one could not possibly have taken in, which cried out for another chance to do so, yet which was tantalisingly lost in the passage of concentrated time. Above all, though, and this may be the ultimate ‘lesson’, we learned a little better to listen to one another.

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.

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.

   

On the centenary of Pierrot lunaire...

... or rather of its first public performance, on 16 October 1912. Is there any work that stands so proudly before the music of the twentieth century and pushes the Romanticism of the previous century to its extreme and beyond? Not even The Rite of Spring, whatever its musical greatness and the quasi-legendary nature of its premiere the following year. If too often today performances of Stravinsky's masterpiece have been neutralised, the Rite degraded into an orchestral showpiece, then Pierrot seems, like so much of Schoenberg's œuvre, still, in an almost Adornian sense, to resist. The very notion of adequacy in performance seems misplaced. It seems impossible even to agree upon how its Sprechstimme should be 'voiced'. The very make-up of its instrumental ensemble is prophetic of so much 'New Music' to come. Can one imagine Le marteau sans maître without Pierrot? More to the point, could Boulez have done? Peter Maxwell Davies's Pierrot Players, later the Fires of London, took Schoenberg's quintet as its core. Hans Werner Henze's Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer took the same ensemble as its emobdiment of sickly, bourgeois expressionism - and, almost despite itself, despite the composer's intentions, ended up offering to the Pierrot-ensemble the most compelling music. Stravinsky, who could in equal measure hit musical nails squarely on the head and prove himself grotesquely wrong-headed, came perhaps closer to the truth than anyone else when he celebratedly described Pierrot as  'the solar plexus as well as the mind of early-twentieth-century music'. We might simply delete the 'early'. And so, in tribute to that performance in Berlin's Choralian-Saal from Albertine Zehme as reciter, Eduard Steuermann, Jakob Masiniak, Hans Kindler, Hans de Vries, and Karl Eßberger, here are the score and one of the great recorded performances of the Dreimal sieben Gedichte, from Boulez, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and Christine Schäfer:

Chamber version of Schoenberg's 'Lied der Waldtaube': Norman/EIC/Boulez

Performances of Gurrelieder are, for obvious reasons, infrequent. It remains one of the great 'special occasion' works, more so even than Mahler's Eighth Symphony. (Oddly, I have never heard a bad performance of Schoenberg's early masterwork, whereas I have heard far too many pointless accounts of the so-called 'Symphony of a Thousand', one very recently indeed.) It is not forbidding in the way that Moses und Aron is (or at least people who do not listen to it fear that it might be); it is simply a huge undertaking. Yet I have never knowingly met a listener who did not fall in love with Gurrelieder. Sincerity is never enough, of course, but the greatness of Schoenberg as a human being as well as a musician shines through the pages of his vast cantata. It is, then,  all the more bewildering that the chamber version of the 'Song of the Wood-dove' is not performed every other night by ensemble and soprano. Nothing will ever replace the luxurious full orchestral version, but if Schoenberg's ideas on instrumentation progressed throughout his work on the original - one of the many fascinating voyages one takes in a performance - they had done all the more so by 1922, the time of that unaccountably neglected masterpiece, the Serenade, op.24. Here are Jessye Norman, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and Pierre Boulez, in a recording I have loved since I first heard it.





Those who know the full work will be aware of the context for subtly increasing terror; those who do not should rectify that state of affairs as a matter of urgency... And soloists, ensembles, conductors, please permit us to hear in the flesh this and many other of the composer's works. Gurrelieder may never be performed every day, but Schoenberg should be.

Exquisite Labyrinth (4) - Hannigan/EIC/Lucerne Academy/Boulez

Royal Festival Hall

Barbara Hannigan (soprano)
Ensemble Intercontemporain
Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble
Pierre Boulez (conductor)


What an embarrassment of riches there has been over this weekend, opening with Rozenne Le Trionnaire’s fine account of the solo version of Domaines, and now climaxing in Pli selon pli, from Barbara Hannigan, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble (another Boulez initiative), and Pierre Boulez himself. This is a work, apparently now complete, whose stature appears to grow with every hearing: there can certainly now be no doubt that it is one of the towering masterpieces of post-war music. But alongside the revisions, it is equally interesting to note Boulez’s transformation of approach as a conductor. His reading certainly does not lack bite, as the ejaculating éclat of both opening and closing chords made clear, but the sonorities seem to have become still more ravishing. More than once I was put in mind of his recent conducting of Szymanowski, and of course his increasingly Romantic approach to the music of the Second Viennese School. For all Boulez’s talk of having devoted too much of his life to conducting, it has clearly enriched his compositional life so greatly that there really are no grounds for such regret and, once again, we heard a conducted performance that was more new composition in the light of recent experience than mere presentation of a work from the museum. (That, by no means incidentally, holds as much for his Wagner and Mahler, his Berlioz and Debussy, as for his own works.)


Following that extraordinary opening chord, we were bathed in the delectable light of Barbara Hannigan’s soprano, her breathing unabashedly sensual, and some truly gorgeous instrumental playing. The Szymanowski-like tapestry unfolded with a perfect balance between clarity and mystery, possibility and purpose: perhaps the essence of what Arnold Whittall has referred to as Boulez’s later ‘modern classicism’. There is something of that quality to his more recent conducting too: contrast the early, angry accounts of Le marteau sans maître and even Pli selon pli, with his more recent work. I do not necessarily prefer one above the other, but experience reaps an undeniably rich harvest. If I thought of Szymanowski, I also thought of Mozart: what ears to envisage such sounds, whether the latter’s Gran Partita, which Boulez has recently recorded with the EIC, or Pli selon pli, let alone to translate such aural imagination into reality! Strings evinced Messiaenesque sweetness, and I fancied that I heard something of a dawn chorus too. The pizzicati of ‘Don’ sounded almost balletic: ‘mellowing’ is not quite the right word to describe the conductor’s development, but a greater willingness to ravish is certainly present and welcome. At another extreme – I was going to say ‘the other’, but Boulez is always more complex than mere binary opposition would allow – there were occasional hints of a viol consort, refracted through the ages.


In the first Improvisation, Hannigan sounded as seductive, as erotic, as a Mélisande, a Salome even, whilst the orchestra surrounding her seemed clearly to draw upon Boulez’s readings of works as apparently different as Das Lied von der Erde – what a contrast with Lorin Maazel’s latest effort in that work! – and Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi. ‘Une dentelle s’abolit’ brought a primal scream upon ‘blême’, yet one whose instrumental aftermath both consoled and aroused. Percussion seemed to foreshadow, and yet in performance already go beyond, a work such as Rituel. Of course, the words are almost as beautiful as the music, and the melismatic writing of the third Improvisation heightened our sense of both, especially when so expertly delivered as by Hannigan. Percussion once again came to the fore, both a visual spectacular – the coordination of the players – as well as an aural banquet. ‘Tombeau’ sounded inevitable resonances with other tombeaux, whether Boulez’s own or those of other composers: again I thought of Das Lied von der Erde and Rituel, but also of the bells in Boris Godunov, rejoicing now turned to other ends. The final horn call seemed to evoke Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, one of many farewells to German Romanticism that are yet not quite farewells. For its æsthetic has probably never quite been negated, certainly not by Boulez; via Mallarmé, it may even have been dialectically reinstated, ‘aufgehoben’. Certainly the final blow, cataclysmic yet undeniably pleasurable, suggested less a final full circle than an Hegelian spiral.

Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart/EIC/Mälkki - Ivan Fedele, Johannes Maria Staud, and Bruno Mantovani, 17 June 2011

Salle des concerts, Cité de la musique

Ivan Fedele – Animus anima II, for vocal ensemble
Johannes Maria Staud – Par ici! (world premiere, Ensemble Intercontemporain commission)
Bruno Mantovani – Cantata no.1, for six singers and ensemble

Neue Vocalsoloisten Stuttgart
Robin Meier (IRCAM sound realisation)
Franck Berthoux (IRCAM sound engineer)
Ensemble Intercontemporain
Susanna Mälkki (conductor)



This was a splendid concert: three fine contemporary works, one of which was receiving its first performance, in performances that seemed fully worthy of their stature. One expects excellent things of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, of course, but that is no reason to take its achievements for granted. The concert slotted nicely into two slots, IRCAM’s Agora Festival, and the Cité de la musique’s Fifth Vocal Art Biennale, the latter ranging from Dufay to Scelsi via Monteverdi, Mendelssohn, Schoenberg, and many others.


First up was Ivan Fedele’s Animus anima II, a 2009 work to texts by Giuliani Corti. The solo voices of the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart seemed quite at home with it, as well they might, since that ensemble commissioned the work. Formed of four movements, lasting about twenty minutes in total, this is a piece made up of an array of words, more concerned, according to Corti, with animus, whilst voices provide the anima: a binary opposition fundamental to the work’s progression. Each of the four movements takes its name from a figure of the anima: ‘Incipit’, ‘Eros’, ‘Vox’, and ‘Anghelos’. The language being Italian, almost every word – but not quite – ends with a vowel, which, at least to a non-Italian ear, imparts a certain sort of musical vocalism already. Is it noteworthy that the first word, ‘caos’ (‘chaos’) provides an exception? Perhaps, for we seem to undergo some form of creatio ex nihilo, especially when one comes to consider Fedele’s music.


Corti’s programme note confined itself to aspects of his text, so, a newcomer to Fedele, I had no idea what to expect, a situation that lent an apt, expectant sense of creation to my listening. Sounds became song in ‘Incipit’, answering negatively my initial questioning as to whether the vocal writing might remain stranded in a world too overtly inspired by aspects of Nono and Lachenmann. The words’ sounds remain, however, of crucial importance, to musical development. There is, as sometimes with Nono, a sense of Renaissance music – in this case, the vocal consort – being refracted and rejuvenated through contemporary means. ‘Eros’ opens with a swifter, more jubilant tone, soon transformed into spoken debate, thereafter into whispering, before returning to jubilant song, often in triple time. At its more ornate, I sensed a kinship with Monteverdian madrigal-writing. Flowery solo moments, including an especially lovely mezzo contribution (Truike van der Poel) characterise ‘Vox’, along with an impression – not simply pitch-based – of ascension. ‘Anghelos’ opens at a fast tempo, not unlike ‘Eros’, with an almost Messiaenesque (bird) chorus – albeit here accomplished through words and the sound of words. Alternating between such material and slower sections, this ultimately proved an exultant finale. The performance had no conductor, but was directed where necessary – often it was not – by a member of the ensemble, whose contribution, so far as I could tell, was thoroughly excellent.


Johannes Maria Staud’s Par ici!, for ensemble, received its world premiere from the Ensemble Intercontemporain under Susanna Mälkki. Taking its name from a line in Baudelaire’s ‘Voyage’ (the last of his Fleurs du Mal), it is composed instrumentally for flute, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, percussion, violin, viola, cello, double bass, and electronic MIDI piano, the latter creating in effect a micro-tonal instrument whose temperament may be modified by touch, Staud’s inspiration being the piano scordatura of Gérard Grisey. ‘Impure’ intervals present not an out-of-tune instrument of weird ‘effects’ – we can leave that to the ‘authenticke’ brigade – but a micro-tonal array of new harmonic possibilities, quite in keeping with the perfumed possibilities of Baudelaire:


The opening flute line, here delivered by long-time EIC member, Sophie Cherrier, triggers off contributions from the other instrumentalists, including the modified piano (Dimitri Vassilakis). This is a febrile opening, full of tension within a slow tempo. Post-Ligeti (perhaps also post-Xenakis) string swarming continues the musical development. For there is a real sense of dramatic trajectory here, within the eight minutes of Staud’s work; it is almost a Lisztian tone poem for the twenty-first century. I very much look forward to hearing it again and indeed to further exploration of the composer’s work. Mälkki and the EIC seemed fully to have the piece’s measure: let us hope for a recording.

Nous nous embarquerons sur la mer des Ténèbres
avec le cœur joyeux d’un jeune passager.
Entendez-vous ces voix, charmantes et funèbres,
qui chantent : «Par ici ! Vous qui voulez manger
le Lotus parfumé !»

Finally came Bruno Mantovani’s Cantata no.1, in which instrumentalists (clarinet, horn, percussion, piano, viola, and cello), conductor, and vocal soloists were united. I admired Mantovani’s opera, Akhmatova, earlier this year; if anything, I thought this 2006 work finer still. Or perhaps it was that I found it easier to grasp as a whole. At any rate, the form is almost ‘traditional’, in that it takes eleven poems by Rilke, and sets them sequentially but as part of a greater whole, for the most part with instrumental interludes. The order is as follows: ‘Es ist noch Tag auf der Terrasse’, ‘Gesang der Frauen an den Dichter’, ‘Der Tod der Geliebten’, ‘Herbst’, ‘Das Lied der Bildsäule’, ‘Pietà’, ‘Träume, die in deinen Tiefen wallen’, ‘Ein weißes Schloß in weißer Einsamkeit’, ‘Wir haben lange im Licht gelacht’, ‘Um die vielen Madonnen’, and ‘Schlußstück’. I was actually put in mind more than once of a chamber reimagination of Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony, though have no reason to think that anything more than my own fancy.


The opening clarinet solo, here in the expert hands of Alain Damiens, announces a post-Boulezian musical legacy of arabesques, more violent than their counterparts in Akhmatova, against which a counter-tenor solo movement may be heard, Daniel Gloger’s rendition pure, precise, and yet nevertheless sensuous. That violence is resumed in the first interlude’s cello part, giving way to ravishing piano-led harmonies (the interludes between fourth and fifth songs, and fifth and sixth, sound frankly post-Debussyan), and a sustained horn note around which the piano can play, such play skilfully, sensitively accomplished by Vassilakis. Mantovani deploys a great deal of variation in terms of forces used: solo voices, higher or lower groups of voices, full vocal ensemble, and the a cappella writing of ‘Träume’ and ‘Um die vielen Madonnen’. Interaction with the instrumentalists provides further variation and continuity, as for instance in the viola and clarinet protests against a trio of higher voices in ‘Gesang der Frauen an den Dichter’, which seem to persist in the subsequent cello reaction to the vocalists, or the monotonal percussion response to four male voices in ‘Der Tod der Geliebten’. One really gains a sense, then, of a cantata written in a sense responding to, without imitating, Bach’s supreme and often highly experimental example. Indeed, the employment of bass and B-flat clarinet (both played by Damiens) in 'Herbst' reminded me of the richness of Bach’s woodwind family, only occasionally recaptured in subsequent music. Likewise, the tenor’s arioso-like writing in ‘Das Lied der Bildsäule’ necessarily has resonances with earlier music. Repeated attempts, eventually successful, to voice the word ‘Träume’ both recalled the opening of Fedele’s work and substitute for an instrumental interlude. Mantovani’s a cappella setting proved haunting in itself and an apt preparation for the resumption of Boulezian hostilities in the instrumental transition to the next song, ‘Ein weis Schloß in weißer Einsamkeit’, whose near-hysterical climax upon the ‘Schloß’ of ‘Es blinkt das Schloß’ leads ultimately to delirious entwining of two soprano voices, almost a duet-response to Strauss’s Daphne, in ‘Wir haben lange im Licht gelacht’. The opening warbling ensemble of the penultimate ‘Um die vielen Madonnen’ brought to mind the post-Messiaen writing of the final movement of the Fedele piece, but Mantovani’s setting proved more focused upon the words rather than their sounds, not unlike some of Schoenberg’s choral writing, though doubtless the German language is an issue here too. There was to be no interlude between that movement and ‘Schlußstück’, with its immediate, violent fortissimo outburst from all concerned, hanging over the rest of the poem. Percussion and viola sound the final instrumental voices, an equivocal signal of something akin to life in the light of Rilke’s verse:

Der Tod ist groß.
Wir sind die Seinen lachenden Munds.
Wenn wir uns mitten im Leben meinen,
wagt er zu weinen
mitten in uns.

Three excellent works then, by three excellent composers, in three excellent performances. Though I imagined that the highlight of this visit to Paris would take place at the Palais Garnier or the Opéra Bastille, there can be no question that it was here, in the Cité de la musique, at the intersection of two festivals.

Carter Centenary Concert - Carter and Boulez, Aimard/Damiens/EIC/Boulez, 11 December 2008

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Carter – Dialogues
Carter – Matribute, for solo piano
Carter – Intermittences, for solo piano
Carter – Caténaires, for solo piano
Carter – Clarinet concerto
Boulez – Dérive II

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)
Alain Damiens (clarinet)
Ensemble Intercontemporain
Pierre Boulez (conductor)

Following the previous night’s Messiaen celebrations – in practice, at least as much a celebration of Boulez – the Ensemble Intercontemporain, its founder, and Pierre-Laurent Aimard moved on to Elliott Carter, for his hundred birthday. The astounding difference, or one of them, is of course that Carter is still with us – and still composing: unprecedented for one entering his eleventh decade.

Prior to the opening work, we saw a recorded interview with him, in which he was still very much the Carter of old, buoyed with enthusiasm for his most recent projects, including a clarinet quintet for Charles Neidich and the Juillard Quartet, and a flute concerto for Emmanuel Pahud. Carter poignantly expressed the hope that he might hear the latter, none of its first performances having taken place in America. Europe, he explained, has always been more receptive to his music, not least since broadcasting is not here – perhaps one should add, not solely – based upon the needs of advertising. If it is true, as Carter claimed, that he has more ‘friends’ in Europe than in his own land, we should consider that to be an honour. On the other hand, we should also consider how, in the words of Daniel Barenboim in one of several programme tributes, Carter ‘combines America with Europe’. This concert made a very good start.

Dialogues, a concertante piece for piano and ensemble, provided a glittering opening. Rather to my surprise, and despite Aimard’s predictably fine performance, I found much of the orchestral writing more compelling than the piano part – although perhaps this will change with greater acquaintance. As ever with Carter, there was an abundant sense of life, of joy. Poised midway between chamber and orchestral music, a work such as this is the lifeblood of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, whose performance could hardly be faulted.

With Matribute – ‘ma tribute’ – a short piece written for James Levine, to honour Levine’s mother, we reached the solo piano selection. I was taken with the contrast between melodic development, rising up through the keyboard’s octaves, and that characteristic Carter kinetic energy, both influencing each other and yet never quite merging. Intermittences and Caténaires were given what was described as the United Kingdom premiere of their joint existence as Two Thoughts about the Piano. If this were stretching a point somewhat, there was no need, since such fine piano writing needs no pretext for performance. It was, in any case, my first hearing of either piece. Aimard once again proved a spellbinding guide, though the silences (intermittences, as in Proust) and eruptions of the first piece. His fingers and feet – for here, pedalling is crucial, not least with regard to the middle pedal – were wholly at the service of the music and as communicative to the audience as one could imagine. The different ‘characters’ – always a key feature of Carter’s writing – were vividly portrayed, as was the more single-character nature of Caténaires. Its toccata-like single line spun if anything an even more gripping narrative, almost miraculously transforming the chordal instrument into a giant violin – solo Bach sprang to my mind – all the more to impress us with the variety of colours a single line can produce.

The Clarinet Concerto received an equally commanding interpretation. Commissioned by Boulez and the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and written with Alain Damiens in mind – he and they premiered the work in 1997 – one could hardly have wished for a more authoritative or, again, vivacious performance. The five sections of the orchestra each had their opportunities to shine, to interact, to project their ‘character’ or ‘characters’, and they took them. Damiens and Boulez not only held the work together – Damiens literally moving around the stage, to interact with each group – but appeared to engage in a dialogue of their own, reminding us that this is a concerto, with considerable ambiguity concerning the relationship between blend and battle when it comes to the soloist and other players. Once again, there was energetic game-playing aplenty, but there were also oases of calm, the harmonies of the string-based Largo section quite ravishing, and unerringly placed in terms of the dramatic game-plan.

Where the previous evening, Boulez had presented his sur Incises, here we had the revision, completed in 2006, of Dérive II. The work was now double the length of the previous time I had heard it. In many ways, it seems Janus-faced, connecting back to the SACHER-inspired works of the 1970s and 1980s, whilst also showcasing much of his more recent harmonic and structural development. As ever, the overwhelming sensation is of proliferation, in every aspect of the music. It was also striking how every instrument in the ensemble – eleven instrumentalists: woodwind, strings, and tuned percussion, including piano – was given ample opportunity to shine; it would be invidious to single out any one in particular, though I must mention the echoes of the Rite of Spring in the bassoon writing. One aspect that somewhat surprised me was how frankly thematic much of Boulez’s writing proved to be. In this, the expert performance of the EIC, under his direction, contributed a great deal. The oft-elusive ability to find an ending, most definitely achieved in sur Incises, was again displayed here: rhythmically exciting in the lead-up to its final, unanswerable unison.

Messiaen Centenary Concert - Messiaen and Boulez, Aimard/Ensemble Intercontemporain/Boulez, 10 December 2008

Royal Festival Hall

Messiaen – Couleurs de la cité céleste, for piano, wind, and percussion
Messiaen – Sept Haïkaï, for piano and orchestra
Boulez – sur Incises

Sébastien Vichard (piano)
Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)
Ensemble Intercontemporain
Pierre Boulez (conductor)

And so, the Southbank Centre’s festival, From the canyons to the stars: the music of Oliver Messiaen, directed by Pierre-Laurent Aimard, came to an end on Messiaen’s hundredth birthday. Aimard, typically self-effacing, and on typically spectacular form, played in only one of the three works performed. He ceded the stage to the greatest of Messiaen’s many pupils, Pierre Boulez, not only as conductor of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, but also as composer of sur Incises. There was added historical weight to Boulez’s presence in that he had conducted the first performances of both Messiaen works: Couleurs de la cite céleste at Donaueschingen in 1964 and Sept Haïkaï as part of the legendary Domaine Musical concert series – precursor in a sense to the permanently-established EIC – two years earlier. To Boulez as conductor we must therefore, in the case of the latter work, add Boulez as commissioner.

For Couleurs de la cite céleste, Aimard ceded his place as pianist to Sébastien Vichard, a member of the EIC. Vichard was more than adequate to the task; it was only when Aimard played for Sept Haïkaï that it became truly apparent what a musician so utterly steeped in Messiaen’s music might have added. There remained much to savour, however, despite the occasional – and most surprising – slightly ragged moment from the woodwind. The ensemble sounded more ‘French’ in timbre than I had expected, harking back, whether through chance or design, to the sounds Messiaen might have heard in Parisian concert-life. A typically Messiaenesque polarity was set up and implacably maintained between the unbending ritualism of his alleluias and the freedom of birdsong. In between, trombone and bells sounded the apocalypse in splendidly sonorous fashion. Vichard shone as his piano sang in unison with the bells, imparting a true sense of awe. The Brucknerian silences – and gong-echoes – of the conclusion were given their full worth by Boulez, mindful perhaps of his more recent success in conducting the music of another deeply pious and in some senses untimely composer.

Sept Haïkaï is, I think, a tougher proposition for the listener, at least for the Western listener. Not only is there a good dose of late-‘Darmstadt’ – actually, as mentioned above, Donaueschingen – aggression; there is none of the Catholic mooring that often helps us to find our bearings in Messiaen. Here instead the religious aspect relates to the Buddhist and Shinto temples of Japan and birdsong plays a still greater, parallel role than in the first work. Yet there is the same polarity between freedom and ritual, which once again Boulez brought to the fore. The eruption of birdsong in the third movement, Yamanaka – cadenza, gave the impression of an ultimately irrepressible force finally bursting forth. Aimard’s solo cadenzas transformed notes into music, leaving this listener utterly spellbound. In the Gagaku, as Peter Hill explained in a characteristically excellent programme note, Messiaen imitated the timbres of traditional Japanese instruments such as the reedy hichiriki – which Messiaen himself described as 'extremely disagreeable and at the same time expressive' (!) – and the shô, a form of mouth organ. Messiaen’s description seemed to be followed to the letter by the combination of two oboes and English horn; nor did I care for the string harmonies, played sul ponticello and non vibrato. Still, that is what Messiaen wrote – and that is what we heard. Far more to my taste was the range of sonorities Aimard employed and the staggering virtuosity he unleashed in the sixth movement, Les Oiseaux de Karuizawa. Boulez’s command was almost unnervingly displayed in the strange deceleration with which that movement closes. (According to Hill, Messiaen’s notebook describes the Ô-yoshikiri bird’s song as resembling the acceleration and deceleration of an engine.) In the coda, there was a palpable sense of return to the guardian gods of the first-movement introduction, of coming full circle. And then both music and performance straightforwardly stopped.

Impressive though the Messiaen pieces in the first half were, sur Incises is the considerably greater work, indeed a masterpiece, receiving a performance to match. It is now more than eight years since I first heard sur Incises, in a performance conducted by Pierre-André Valade, with the London Sinfonietta, on Boulez’s seventy-fifth birthday. Good though that had been, this performance, under the non-baton of the composer himself, seemed to me definitive. The musicians of the EIC – three pianists, three harpists, and three percussionists – had the music under their skins and could therefore interpret it as part of the repertoire, rather than merely presenting it as new music: always a stated aim of Boulez’s music-making. There is, in the instrumentation, of course, the odd echo of Les Noces, but in reality Boulez’s strategy is quite different. The spatial element, here superbly realised, and assisted by the much-improved acoustic of the Royal Festival Hall, allows one to hear solo lines but also different groups: three groups, considered vertically, each of percussion, harp, and piano, and, considered horizontally, the three percussionists, the three harpists, and the three pianists. One of the most startling aspects of the latter formations is to hear passages transferring spatially across, say, the three pianos, whilst remaining in a sense part of the one giant piano – Incises, the original work, is for piano solo – played by the composer-conductor. Another striking aspect is the often Romantic tinge to the piano writing; I even fancied that I heard the influence of Chopin. It is also as if Boulez is playing with a musical magical square, albeit in a rather different sense from Webern’s, the three rows and columns constantly shifting, and yet somehow always adding up to the whole. For in a host of different ways, it is the sonorities that beguile; indeed, I do not think that any composer has secured, nor any conductor elicited, such beguiling sonorities. There are harmonies of Debussyan sumptuousness, but there is also a kinetic, rhythmic energy that brings to mind Stravinsky and Bartók to mind. The ghost of Bartók seems especially present in some of the piano writing, which then proves contagious for the other instrumentalists. Such progressions are the stuff of this music, another being that of reflection, for instance in the ruminative cadenza-like passages for piano, bringing forth life, and vice versa. The serial principle, so powerfully realised in this performance, is anything but constricting; it is rather a principle of an ever expanding universe, forever sparking off some further musical reaction. Moreover, this performance reminded one of Boulez’s infinite compositional flexibility, putting him, despite the context of this context, rather closer to Debussy than to Messiaen. Despite the sense – and, I suspect, for many, the desire – that this universe could have gone on expanding, its materials proliferating, forever, the very real, magical conclusion proved quite a contrast from the abrupt, if perfectly timely curtailment of the Sept Haïkaï. There could be no doubt that this was Boulez’s night, as was underlined by the surprisingly – at least to me – ecstatic reaction he received from the audience. I ought, like Messiaen, to have had greater faith.