Berlin Festtage (7) – WEDO/Barenboim: Debussy, Boulez, and Ravel, 4 April 2015

Philharmonie

Debussy – Prélude à l’après-midi d’une faune

Boulez – Dérive 2

Ravel – Rapsodie espagnole

Alborado del gracioso

Pavane pour une infant défunte

Boléro

West-Eastern Divan Orchestra

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

 

All good things must come to an end – though not, we can now be sure, the recent near-exponential growth of interest in Pierre Boulez’s music. The always-unpersuasive claims about the ‘box office’, ‘elitism’, and so on have, this year, already been shown to be utter nonsense. The Barbican sold out tickets for many of its ‘Total Immersion’ events; here again, a concert in which Boulez’s music made up half the programme sold out. What his music, like that of any other great composer, needs is at the very least excellent, committed performances. That was always Boulez’s claim concerning the music of the Second Viennese School, and how he showed that to be true! Now subsequent conductors are doing the same for his music, no conductor more so than Daniel Barenboim. The greatest Beethoven conductor alive, the founder of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra: that is a ‘name’ who will bring people to Boulez, and indeed one who uncontestably has. My Festtage events thus went out on a high.

First came Prélude a l’après-midi d’un faune. Barenboim did not conduct the beautifully played opening solo (others were equally beautiful), simply letting Guy Eshed get on with it. The baton was only lifted for the entry of the orchestra. In a sense, that gesture – and that lack thereof – prepared the way, consciously or otherwise, for the dialectic between freedom and determinism that lies at the heart of so much of Boulez’s work. This was, like Boulez’s VPO recording, a sultry account, almost as if Ravel’s Spanish sun were already risen, but not at the expense of the ambiguity that makes Debussy Debussy, and which may indeed be his most important legacy. I was struck by the difficult-to-pin-down French sound Barenboim elicited from the West-Eastern Divan, translucency not the least of its qualities. Gorgeous string vibrato was equally welcome.

Of all of Boulez’s music, I perhaps still find Dérive 2 the hardest to grasp as a whole. I am in no doubt that the fault lies with me, having no truck with a dismissal I heard in conversation with a distinguished composer, who described it as ‘culinary’ – surely an insult worthy of the young Boulez himself. Barenboim has said he considers it perhaps Boulez’s finest work, and many others are especially drawn to it. My journey towards understanding certainly seemed to be sped up by this fine performance from Barenboim and his players, who exhibited still greater confidence than they had in their Proms account in 2012. Whatever the ‘authenticists’ might say, and no one has been fuller of scorn for them than Boulez, one is far likely to play Beethoven better, once one has the music under one’s skin; the same is true of Boulez. Barenboim’s exposition of the opening material was clear and pregnant with possibility, faithful in the best sense to the work, just like his Debussy or indeed his Beethoven. (How I wish he would conduct Pelléas!) The uncredited marimba player’s early contributions were a particular joy, drawing me in to the musical argument. Michael Wendeberg, whom I heard as piano soloist earlier in the week, was, for all his excellence, very much an ensemble player here, his exemplary contributions clearly drawing on his experience as a member of the Ensemble Intercontemporain. Counterpoint, though not so much sonority, led me to think of Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony, of which I have never heard a finer performance than under Boulez here in Berlin. Ebb and flow sometimes seemed to draw more upon the composer’s Debussyan inheritance – or was that perhaps the canny programming? It need not, arguably should not, be either/or. At other times, a more ‘mechanistic’ spirit was manifest, the contrast putting me in mind of Boulez’s early – and, in their orchestral form, ongoing – Notations. A wonderful bassoon solo (Mor Biron) seemed momentarily to evoke the opening of The Rite of Spring, but whilst ‘derivation’ in Boulez’s sense may be the name of the game, there is absolutely nothing ‘derivative’ in the pejorative sense to this work. There is nothing enigmatic to the audible ‘derivation’, and this performance helpfully underlined its achievement. If I still find the work a little daunting, I do so less than I did; and my immediate reaction was that to hear again, preferably immediately, such a performance would bring me closer still.

Ravel’s Spanish works were the material of the second half, just as they had been for the WEDO’s Proms concert last year. The Rapsodie espagnole proceeded in quasi-symphonic style; certainly there was great purpose to the performance, though not in any sense at the expense of sonority and general atmosphere. The ‘Prélude á la nuit’ reprised and extended, made personal to Ravel, the sultriness we had heard in Debussy. It was – and not in an Ann Widdecombe/Michael Howard sense – very much ‘of the night’. The brilliance of the opening of the ‘Malagueña’ was owed in no small part to the excellence of the double basses. A darkened kaleidoscope revealed all manner of riches. Quiet insistence of rhythm marked the ‘Habanera’, preparing the way for a gorgeous celebration of sound in the closing ‘Feria’. Alborado del gracioso received a sparkling performance, colour and rhythm working their Ravelian alchemy. As at the Proms, Barenboim rarely conducted – at least with his baton. Pavane pour une infante défunte was arguably a little too languid at times, but that is to nitpick, for it remained a beautifully played performance. Boléro proceeded on its way for quite some time without Barenboim raising his baton. It was a showcase for the orchestra, but no mere showcase. Most important, the orchestra, if I am to go on the stolen glances between desks, clearly enjoyed itself. As did we; as, I think, did Barenboim. As, I think, would have Boulez. The now-inevitable Carmen excerpts offered brilliant, generous encores.

 

Prom 17: Summers/Members of the WEDO/Roth - Beethoven and Boulez, 26 July 2012

Royal Albert Hall

Beethoven – Quintet for piano and wind instruments in E-flat major, op.16
Boulez – Le Marteau sans maître

Guy Eshed (flute)
Ramón Ortega Quero (oboe)
Shirley Brill (clarinet)
Juan Antonio Jiménez (horn)
Keynep Koyluoglu (bassoon)
Ori Kam (viola)
Caroline Delume (guitar)
Bishara Harouni (piano)
Adrian Salloum (xylorimba)
Pedro Manel Torrejón González (vibraphone)
Noya Schleien (percussion)
Hilary Summers (contralto)
François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

It was a splendid idea to have a late-night Prom devoted to Boulez and Beethoven, as if an appendix to the ‘main business’ of the early evening series. ‘Appendix’ is the wrong word, I am sure, since this was an enjoyable concert in its own right, and any performance including Le Marteau sans maître can hardly be considered light fare, let alone peripheral. It was a pity, of course, that Pierre Boulez was unable to travel to conduct what remains perhaps his single most celebrated work, but François-Xavier Roth proved an able replacement.

Mozart’s voice was very much to the fore during the performance of Beethoven’s op.16 quintet, for piano, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn. The introduction to the first movement possessed considerable breadth, recalling a good number of Mozartian examples, followed by an ebullient account which never tipped into aggression. Beethoven’s gorgeous harmonies were relished without exaggeration. The new life of the coda – a truly Beethovenian touch even in 1796 – was properly felt. Each of the soloists contributed beautifully to the Andante cantabile. Perhaps most notable of all was the limpid horn-playing of Juan Antonio Jiménez, but this was a fine collection of soloists. The tempo was well chosen, a true slow movement, with no fashionable rushing. If there were occasions when the greater line was not always quite so apparent as it might have been, the playing itself remained delectable. The finale was equally post-Mozartian, echoing not only Mozart’s own quintet for the same forces but works such as the E-flat major piano concerto, KV 482. Beethoven did not always find it possible – or even desirable – to emulate Mozart’s (apparent) super-human ease, but he did here, as did the performance. Even syncopations were of Mozart’s ilk: catchy, loving even, rather than abrupt, let alone rupturing.

An entirely different set of musicians – there is no overlap in instrumentation – was joined by Hilary Summers and François-Xavier Roth for Le Marteau sans maître. When I have heard the work recently, I have been struck by its metamorphosis into ‘classic’, maybe even ‘classical’, status. No longer an object of controversy, it stands not unlike, say, Pierrot lunaire, which we shall hear later in the Proms season, from Christine Schäfer and the Nash Ensemble. Yet, whereas Pierre’s ghost of Pierrot had been very much to be heard haunting the composer’s own 2010 Berlin performance with musicians from the Divan, Roth’s Schoenbergian precursor, perhaps especially during the first movement, seemed to be the brittler, more neo-Classical, Serenade, op.24. Again, as the work becomes ever more part of the repertoire, perhaps even of Boulez’s ‘museum’, different interpreters will find different things to say about it, different aspects to draw out. (Incidentally, is it not time that London had another performance of the magnificent Serenade? I have never even heard it ‘live’.) The opening of the second movement, ‘Commentaire I de “Bourreaux de solitude”,’ came as quite a contrast, delicate, quasi-African sonorities to the fore, with rhythmic structure underpinned by a perhaps surprisingly old-style – think of Boulez’s earlier recordings – post-Webern pointillism. Percussion came to sound more ‘percussive’, as it were, than we have become used to in the composer’s recent performances; Guy Eshed’s ravishing flute both softened and heightened the effect. Summers’s contralto proved not only deep but finely shaded; there is something very singular about her vocal quality, which suits this music admirably. At times, especially higher in her range, it proved almost bell-like. Her duets with Eshed were particularly to be relished, she equally instrumental, he equally vocal. Ori Kam’s account of the viola part once again – he also performed in that Berlin concert – made one forget how fiendishly difficult Boulez’s writing is; Kam almost made it sound like Mozart, an intriguing connection thereby made with the Beethoven quintet. Occasionally I wondered whether Roth’s direction have benefited from greater momentum, but there was no justification whatsoever for the continual flight from the hall of members of the audience. What were they expecting? And why did some wait until the ninth, final movement to leave? Summers was very much part of the instrumental ensemble by that stage, her timbre of great assistance here, her role as ‘soloist’ almost supplanted by Eshed’s flute upon its entry, which is as it should be.

Prom 12: WEDO/Barenboim (3) - Beethoven and Boulez, 23 July 2012

Royal Albert Hall

Beethoven – Symphony no.6 in F major, op.68, ‘Pastoral’
Boulez – memoriale (...explosante-fixe... originel)
Boulez – Messagesquisse
Beethoven – Symphony no.5 in C minor, op.67

Guy Eshed (flute)
Hassan Moataz El Molla (cello)
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)


The Barenboim/West-Eastern Divan Orchestra Beethoven-Boulez series goes from strength to strength. There will doubtless be someone who begs to differ, but I find it difficult to imagine that anyone in the Royal Albert Hall could have failed to register this as a truly great musical experience – and more than or equal to that, a great experience of the human spirit. Beethoven seems well-nigh impossible for our age to comprehend, or at least to express, which is why we need him all the more. Alas, and not solely on account of the ‘period’ revolution, though that has a great deal to answer for, too many musicians – one would be too many! – seem to have lost any conception of what is required. Daniel Barenboim has not; nor has his inspirational band of young musicians.

There is never a single, ‘correct’ tempo for a piece – though there are of course exceptional works such as Stockhausen’s Gruppen which depend upon intricate tempo relationships – any more than there is a single, ‘correct’ interpretation of a musical work. That said, Barenboim’s account of the first movement of the Pastoral Symphony, indeed of the symphony as a whole, sounded just right. I dread to think at what breakneck speed our authenticist friends would harry Beethoven here, still more how they would refuse to let the music breathe. Whilst I never have the slightest idea, nor interest, in timings as such, Barenboim sounded to me very much in what once would have been the mainstream. Karl Böhm, in his mangificent Vienna Philharmonic recording, might have been a little slower; Carlos Kleiber was probably quicker. The crucial thing was that harmonic rhythm was understood and communicated. And what a cultivated sound the Divan offered; at times, this almost seemed as if it were a Beethoven string quartet writ large. It should go without saying that the development section sounded developmental and that the recapitulation offered a sense of return; alas, in the light of so many recent performances, it is worthy of note – and is of course far easier said than done. The slow movement was utterly beguiling yet equally underpinned by inexorable forward momentum. There is nothing worse here – and this has nothing to do with metronome markings – than the music overstaying its welcome. I almost wished to hear it again.   It now seems so obvious, but I do not think I had previously appreciated how much Beethoven’s ‘tone-painting’ here actually owes to the rather different example of Mozart’s divertimenti. Trust a great Mozartian such as Barenboim to highlight the connection, which could never have been achieved, however, without the ravishing playing of his musicians. The scherzo’s rusticity looked back to Haydn and forward to countless Romantics; above all, it sang and stomped with Beethovenian vigour, which is never, as Barenboim understands, something to be applied from without, but which must come from the telos of the music. Though the storm also sacked nothing either in vigour, its rigour was of a similarly musical nature. By all means imagine whatever country scenes you wish in your head; the music and its performance stand and fall upon their own strengths. Warmth, fulfilment, thanksgiving: all are certainly terms one might employ in discussion of the finale, but again, a Klemperer-like inevitability underpinned their expression or suggestion.

Guy Eshed was the soloist for the ensemble performance that followed. Boulez’s memoriale, at least in this context, provided another, perhaps more surprising, link to the Mozartian divertimento tradition, though anyone who knows the composer’s relatively recent recording of the Gran Partita will know not to be very surprised. This was delectable playing from all concerned, and if the piece itself would prove not only memorial but new beginning (on the path to ...explosante-fixe...), here it offered, if not light relief, then delicious contrast.  Just as in a previous Proms performance from these musicians, Boulezian open-endedness was an abiding impression, an oblique response perhaps to Beethovenian finality?

Messaagesquisse followed: an exciting prospect, given the fine performance I had heard Hassan Moataz El Molla and colleagues from the WEDO give, under Barenboim’s direction, in Berlin a couple of years ago, for the composer’s eighty-fifth birthday. Unfortunately, and I put it mildly, the hall had neglected to inform at least a good number of us – it seems that there were inserts in some programmes, though not others, and no announcement was made – that the interval would come after rather than before the performance. Along with many around me, I sauntered outside for a breath of fresh air, was informed by an usher that the interval would last for twenty minutes – yes, I even asked! – only to find upon my return to the hall, the cellist receiving applause from a significantly reduced audience. Why ever was an announcement not made and/or a notice displayed, and why ever did the staff not inform those of us leaving? Still, it was heart-warming to note on returning home a little postscript to the relevant page on the Proms website: ‘Please note: For technical reasons, it has been necessary to move the position of tonight's interval, which will now occur after Pierre Boulez's Messagesquisse.’ I hope that those listeners at home who would otherwise have reached for the kettle would not have suffered the same fate as many of us paying customers in the hall. Here, below, is a video clip of the Berlin performance I heard.

After the interval proper came Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. I had doubtless been unlucky, but I had never heard in the concert hall a performance I thought worthy of the work, or indeed of the great recorded performances of the past. Now, for the first time, I did. Interestingly, given that a reader quizzed me only a day or so ago about why I rarely mentioned Klemperer’s influence upon Barenboim, I felt that more strongly than I had usually done in the first movement. No one would be able to recreate the very specific circumstances of desperation and defiance to be heard in Furtwängler’s legendary 1943 recording.

Barenboim wisely did not try. But there was to be heard throughout this still incredibly concise movement – Webern must surely have loved it! – something of the implacability, the inexorability, the impossibility of compromise, almost synonymous with Klemperer, one of Barenboim’s greatest mentors. The opening bars knocked one for six, yet did not stand out like a sore thumb, nor indeed at all; they opened, and the music, in the best sense rather than that more generally current, never relented. There was defiance too in the slow movement, its processional status – another nod, or more, to the French Revolution – readily apparent, readily felt. If there were repose at all, it was of the most limited order. Tonal restlessness continually undermined any such temptations, for the battle was far from won. The scherzo offered plenty of opportunity, well taken, for Barenboim’s musicians to shine: one could sense, even without seeing, how well they had been taught to listen to each other. Yet of course this was not a case simply of chamber music on a grander scale – a problem with some of Claudio Abbado’s more recent performances, when it comes to music for which the idea simply is not apposite – for it required, and received, the surety of Barenboim’s guiding hand. (Special mention must be made of the double basses in the trio, digging so deep, so rich, that there could be no doubt that this music meant something, even if that something could never be put into words.) The transition from the ghostly reprise of the scherzo – here, rightly played above all with musical meaning rather than as a strange ‘effect’ – into the finale is surely one of the most extraordinary in all music. Barenboim and the orchestra showed that it need not fall flat in performance, as so often it does; indeed, they showed that Beethoven can still storm, perhaps open, the portals of heaven. In a mediocre performance, the predominance of tonic and dominant harmony can almost become tedious. On this occasion, there was no doubting the optimistic, humanistic blazing of glory that Beethoven offers and our age more often than not seems able only to decline, or at least to snipe at. Having the piccolo player stand looked a little odd, but it enabled us to hear her part properly, and to appreciate what miniature invention lies therein. For the coda acted, as it must, as a release for all the tension built up throughout the symphony. We might still have questions at the end; our historical predicament doubtless makes it inevitable. Yet somehow, this music can still, just, offer us hope. I have no idea how this performance will sound as a recorded memento in the cold light of day. But who needs the cold light of day? Certainly not Beethoven.

Berlin Festtage (4) - Hommage à Pierre Boulez: Members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra/Boulez and Barenboim, 4 April 2010

Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Boulez – Messagesquisse, for violoncello solo and six violoncelli
Anthèmes 2, for violin solo and live electronics
Le Marteau sans maître

Hilary Summers (contralto)
Michael Barenboim (violin)
Hassan Moataz El Molla (violoncello)
Andrew Gerzso (IRCAM computer music designer)
Arshia Cont (IRCAM computer production)
Frédéric Prin (IRCAM sound engineer)
Members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez (conductors)

It was not quite Pierre Boulez’s 85th birthday, which had fallen on 26 March, but this all-Boulez concert at the Linden opera house, bilingually entitled Hommage à Pierre Boulez zum 85. Geburtstag, marked the climax of the Berlin celebrations for this anniversary. Members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra were led by Daniel Barenboim in the opening Messagesquisse and the composer himself in Anthèmes 2 and Le marteau sans maître.

The young Egyptian cellist, Hassan Moataz El Molla, was the excellent soloist in Messagesequisse, joined by six colleagues: Sary Khalifeh, Alberto Martos Lozano, Noa Chorin, Jana Semaan, Linor Katz, and Nassib Ahmadieh. Although there is no electronic element, the use of six other cellos provides a spatial element. These instruments are less an ‘orchestra’, at least in the typical concerto sense, than agents that further, develop, deepen, amplify the solo line. Sometimes akin to a penumbra, sometimes providers of kinetic energy, they present a commentary upon and broadening of the serial processes at work, which, typically for Boulez, provide unity even if they cannot necessarily be heard in themselves. (Here, actually, one can, hear them, at least at times.) Careful shading is crucial – and so it was in this performance. Boulez’s tribute to Paul Sacher, written in 1976 for that great musical patron, became a fitting opening tribute to the composer himself.

Anthèmes 2, which I had heard from Carolin Widmann in Salzburg last year, was now bravely essayed by Michael Barenboim. As pointed out in the excellent programme notes by Yuri Isabella Kato, Boulez’s titles for both the former and present work are portmanteau neologisms, derived from messages and esquisses in the one case, and thèmes and the English ‘anthems’ in the latter. This performance, though hardly without virtuosity – how could it be? – seemed perhaps less overtly so than Widmann’s, live electronics, expertly provided by the IRCAM team under the composer’s supervision, very much to the fore, with speakers placed around the relatively small house. Boulez’s sound world could now be truly transformed, technological developments enabling the electronic developments of which he had long hoped. There was to this performance a fine sense of the open-endedness, the lack of closure, which for Boulez has always been a crucial aspect of serial procedure. It was telling and appropriate, then, that the electronic sound should fade after that of the violinist.

After the interval came what perhaps remains the composer’s most celebrated work, Le Marteau sans maître. Hilary Summers, who sings the contralto part in Boulez’s most recent recording, was joined by Guy Eshed on flute, violist Ori Kam, Caroline Delume on guitar, percussionist Tomer Yariv, and Pedro Manuel Torréjon Gonzáles and Adi Morag on vibraphone and xylorimba respectively. It is by now unavoidable, and indeed quite right, that Le Marteau sans maître has become a ‘classic’, but that did not prevent a sense of rediscovery, doubtless aided by the youthful enthusiasm of the instrumentalists. What an opportunity for them – and how well taken! Allusions, subtle but to this listener unmistakeable, to Pierrot lunaire were to be heard even in the first movement: the lineage is not straightforward but certainly exists. The precision of rhythmic underpinning ensured that warmth and fantasy could be developed above. Voices were both distinctive and complementary, sometimes even merging, as in the flute and viola’s near-marriage at the end of L’Artisanat furieux and the increasing ‘instrumental’ quality of the contralto’s contribution to the final movement, the double, Bel édifice et les pressentiments. Summers’s diction was exemplary throughout, and her almost simple - never simplistic! - directness was something refreshingly different from the qualities other singers have brought to the work, every bit as compelling. Each instrumentalist had an opportunity to shine. Particular instances I noticed were the fine viola playing of Ori Kam in the fourth movement, the stereo pointillism of tuned percussion in Bourreaux de solitude, and, in the penultimate movement, the third commentaire on that poem, the counterpoint of underpinning percussion, tuned and untuned, with the ravishing beauty of the punctuated arabesques of Guy Eshed’s flute solo, already looking forward to …explosante-fixe…. The seventh movement had proved Webernesque in its concision and expressive quality, whilst the final double was perhaps the most seductive of all, once again in Eshed’s solo, but also in the mesmerising closing bars. It is a tribute to the performers that one could only wonder at why many listeners initially found this music so ‘difficult’.