Salzburg Festival (3) - Le Balcon/Pascal: Nono, Boulez, and Stockhausen, 19 August 2025

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Nono: A Pierre. Dell’azzurro silenzio, inquietum
Boulez: sur Incises
Stockhausen: Klavierstück XIV – ‘Geburtstag-Formel’
Boulez: …explosante-fixe…

Julie Brunet-Jailly (flute)

Alphonse Cemin (piano)

Augustin Muller (IRCAM electronics)

Sylvain Cadars (IRCAM sound diffusion)

Le Balcon

Maxime Pascal (conductor)

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

Pierre Boulez’s broader musical-cultural legacy lies everywhere, both in what he achieved and what, sadly, he did not. Quite rightly, in this centenary year we are taking time to focus more specifically on his musical works. From his 1960 Salzburg debut (Stockhausen, Webern, and Boulez, in the presence of Herbert von Karajan), the Festival has long experienced and participated in both—and especially from 1992, at the invitation of Gerard Mortier and Hans Landesmann. I shall rue till my dying day having passed up the opportunity to hear his Moses und Aron, on my first, student visit. It was inevitable, given the choice of one opera, that I would opt for Mozart, yet nevertheless… Here, in any case, the Festival’s centenary tribute will focus on both strands, or rather on three or more, the third being the presence and influence even in non-presence of electronics both in his music and in that broader legacy, exemplified by IRCAM and represented here by Augustin Muller and Sylvain Cadars. 

The mini-series ‘A Pierre’ opened with this concert, which in turn opened in pleasing symmetry with Luigi Nono’s sixtieth birthday tribute for his colleague, A Pierre. Dell Azzurro silenzio, inquietum, for contrabass flute, contrabass clarinet, and live electronics. One instrument entered, then the other: were they playing together or separately? Had they merged? One asked that even before the advent of electronics, or was it? Differences were almost, yet never quite, imperceptible, a message dell-ascolto from the somewhat non-Boulezian world of Prometeo. One was drawn in to listen, in harmony, in polyphony, ever transforming, ever deeper. I could have sworn at one point I heard voices – as in vocal music – and perhaps, in a way, I did. The role of electronics was ‘for’ Pierre, at least, as the Venetian waves lapped and almost Mahlerian vistas opened up before our ears. 

It is an obvious point, but I do not think it had quite registered with me, at least experientially, quite how much difference the performing space would make to a performance of sur Incises. My ears, doubtless my eyes, associate it above all with Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal, where I have heard Daniel Barenboim conduct it more than once (including the hall’s opening concert) with his own created Boulez Ensemble. In a more conventional smallish hall, not in the round, lines seemed more obviously to lead from the conductor—and, in a sense, seated not far behind Maxime Pascal, from the ensemble too—with clear consequences for experience of many aspects of the work ‘itself’. Whether it was that, or the performances of Le Balcon and Pascal—it may have been both—that made the opening section sound quite so Debussyan, I am not sure. It came as a subsequent shock to my ears to hear quite so many floating roots, if you will, in Scriabin in the writing for pianos of the following section. Perhaps it was simply me; never underestimate the role of your own preoccupations or chance connections. However strictly organised, listening as well as composition and performance will break free. When rhythm took its place as first among equals, Stravinsky came most forcefully to mind and, a little more surprisingly, Prokofiev, although then I remember hearing Boulez express admiration for the piano writing in the composer’s concertos. These where ghosts, though, rather than definite influences, and soon one felt—at least I did—fully immersed, albeit actively immersed as, I flattered myself, a participant, enticed and welcomed by performers and work alike. What also struck me was the liminal passages in which not only classic parameters but time and music seemed stretched, even bent: Debussy again, perhaps, even Chopin. Resonance, in more than one sense, played its part too. Waves of a different kind were felt, not only heard, sound and music moving through space as well as time, as Gurnemanz might (not) have put it. 

Following some much needed fresh air, we returned to the hall (the same hall that hosted Boulez’s 1960 debut) for Stockhausen’s contribution to that same 1985 Baden-Baden birthday tribute: Klavierstück XIV, later to be heard as part of the composer’s Montag (for various reasons, a work Boulez was unlikely ever to have conducted). My heart went out to Alphonse Cemin when, just before he was about to begin, a lengthy telephonic intervention rang out. Such was its length that, at least for the audience, it became quite amusing. Was it Karlheinz himself, attempting to dial in from Sirius? When Cemin, a worthy successor to Pierre-Laurent Aimard, gave his fine performance, we were immediately in a different world from anything heard in the first half, though the whimsy of that introduction perhaps persisted a little in his verbal contributions. Here, unquestionably, was a miniature drama, though not only that, and in its ‘birthday formula’ mode, an intriguing set-up for Boulez’s own …explosante-fixe…, founded as it is on what has reasonably been considered a compositional ‘kit’. It was also music unquestionably ‘for’ the piano and to be enjoyed as such by performer and listeners alike in something not so very distant from what we know as music theatre. 

And so, to …explosante-fixe…, which I had not heard live for a little while: the last time, I think, ten years ago for Boulez’s 90^th anniversary, at the Proms. Julie Brunet-Jailly was joined by fellow, ‘shadow’ flautists and other members of Le Balcon in the fullest ensemble of the evening, as well of course as our friends from IRCAM and Pascal. It worked very differently, perhaps better, in the space than sur Incises; or maybe it was more that my ears had adjusted. The immediacy, even straightforward volume, nonetheless took a little getting used to, though only a little. The alchemy of sound in space proved quite magical, even seductive, as if presaging Boulez’s own, later Szymanowskian enchantment. Here was not only a labyrinth, but something between riot and delirium within a labyrinth that was always transforming before our ears: itself somewhere between Pli and pli and the orchestral Notations, which, I suppose, is where the work lies in Boulez’s œuvre. The bending of time I had felt in sur Incises continued, here in a world of very different, dazzling, (quasi-)orchestral fantasy that it was difficult not to think almost classically ‘French’. (Perhaps the presence of French performers contributed to that.) Dimming the lights for passages of ‘pure’ electronics was a theatrical touch, yet a winning one: in highlighting the organ pipes at the back of the stage, it almost suggested a role for that instrument, though alas not. I certainly heard things I could not recall from previous encounters: unexpected guests from The Rite of Spring, the sage’s procession turned post-Sixties psychedelic (or was that Messiaenic)? There was a sense, I fancied, of an almost Bachian mirroring and inversion in the electronics: not necessarily literally, but a quality felt or imagined. Other aspects comfortably, yet never too comfortably returned: those trills and tremolos, for instance. And I realised, only at the close, one thing that made this a relatively unusual soundworld for Boulez ensemble music. Obvious when you think about it: no percussion. So long as we continue to listen, we shall never cease to learn—even the most basic of things.

 

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

Royal Albert Hall

Bartók – Three Village Scenes

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

Jeanne-Marie Conquer (violin)

Andrew Gerzso (IRCAM computer music design)

Carlo Laurenzi (IRCAM computer music production)

Jérémie Henrot (IRCAM sound engineer)

BBC Singers

Ensemble Intercontemporain

Baldur Brönnimann (conductor)

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Aural Choreography and the Threshold: Boulez's Répons

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Lehrbauhof

Répons (two performances)

Soloists:

Hidéki Nagano (piano)

Sébastien Vichard (piano)

Frédérique Cambreling (harp)

Luigi Gaggero (cimbalom)

Samuel Favre (vibraphone)

Gilles Durot (xylophone)

Ensemble Intercontemporain

Andrew Gerzso/Gilbert Nouno (IRCAM electronic realisation)

Matthias Pintscher (conductor) 

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

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

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

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

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

   

EIC/Pintscher - Debussy, Boulez, Robin, and Pintscher, 28 April 2015

Barbican Hall

Debussy – Syrinx

Boulez – Mémoriale (… explosante-fixe … Originel)
Yann Robin – Asymétriades
Matthias Pintscher – Choc (Monumento IV)
Boulez – sur Incises
Boulez – Anthèmes 1 and 2

Sophie Cherrier (flute)

Nicolas Crosse (double bass)

Michael Barenboim (violin)

Arshia Cont and Franck Rossi (IRCAM electronics)

Ensemble Intercontemporain

Matthias Pintscher (conductor)

The Barbican’s Boulez celebrations have not been accorded so high a profile as those in many other European cities. (Click here for a sad report on the dire situation across the Atlantic. The New York Philharmonic, of all orchestras, appears to be ignoring its erstwhile Music Director completely.) Still, each has been welcome, this third, concluding instalment included.

No composer, even Webern, stands closer to Boulez than Debussy. His Syrinx seems to hover presciently over a good few of Boulez’s pieces, his early Sonatine included – and also Mémoriale, which would follow. Sophie Cherrier was the excellent flautist for both pieces. She offered what sounded, lapsing into ‘national’ cliché, a ‘French sound, pure and clear, unencumbered with excessive vibrato. Debussy’s brief solo work thus seemed both to hark back to Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and forward to Mémoriale, which emerged almost as a continuation. In this context, the Ensemble Intercontemporain sounded initially rather as a refraction of the solo part, the ensemble itself emerging into its own identity. Matthias Pintscher ensured a performance that was eminently precise, that precision, like Boulez’s own, never an end in itself, but as a tool of musical expression. This was an exquisite fantasy, of somewhat different, perhaps less sweet, flavour than that offered recently by Karl-Heinz Schütz, the Vienna Philharmonic and Daniel Barenboim in Berlin, but no less welcome. One of the pleasures of such a year – and let us hope that it does not remain a single year – has been to hear different interpretative approaches to Boulez’s music.

 

Yann Robin’s 2014 Asymétriades followed, Nicolas Crosse the double bass soloists. It was the first time I had heard any of Robin’s music; I hope it will not be the last. Although it is easier to point to contrasts with Boulez’s music, one thing that struck me was how the ensemble sound emerged from the double bass, just as I had heard it do from the flute in Mémoriale. Helmut Lachenmann’s example offered another mental comparison: not that this sounded ‘like’ Lachenmann’s music, but almost as if it presented itself very much ‘after’ the German composer’s deconstruction and reconstruction of instrumental performance. The sounds we heard, doubtless unorthodox to conservative ears, owed much to what some still call ‘extended techniques’, but they registered with such confidence as to render such a term, or indeed such a thought, quite anachronistic. That said, I was astonished to hear some of the sounds I heard coming from the ensemble I saw; I often could not say, on a first hearing, what came from where. If such be a secret of orchestration, then it seemed to have been fully mastered. Asymétriades was as visceral as Mémoriale sounded æthereal; it seemed very much an urban landscape and drama, although it should certainly not be reduced to such terms. Varèse, nevertheless, sprang to mind – albeit with very new means. Fast, frenetic, and not without fun, the work’s asymmetries thrilled and confounded. Insofar as I could tell, the performances were superb, not least that of the astoundingly brilliant Crosse. The EIC is as fortunate to have him as it is to have Cherrier.

Pintscher followed that piece with his own 1996 Choc (Monumento IV). Again, there was great contrast to be heard; whilst not without its structurally defining eruptions, nor indeed the éclat common to Robin and, definitively, to Boulez, this was sonically much more of a tapestry, perhaps somewhat in Boulez’s line. However, the sense of, as Pintscher has put it, ‘camouflaging sounds’ was again a thread in common with the preceding work, at least. It is, he was quoted in the programme as having said, ‘part of my compositional thinking, so that one can never exactly be sure who is playing or whether the sound is coming from.’ It needs, of course, an ensemble of the excellence of that founded by Boulez to accomplish that, just as it does in the alchemy of Richard Strauss; that it received here, in a splendidly incisive performance.

… which brings us to sur Incises. The expansion inherent – and discovered – in so much of Boulez’s material is emphatically a conceptual foundation of the work here, as much visually in the layout for three pianos, three percussionists, and three harps, as in this most beguiling dramatic tapestry. Sounding almost decadently Romantic, the performance never lost its sure structural foundation; it scintillated in the best – and proper – sense. The composer’s sheer delight in the sound of three pianos registered, as if one were hearing a multi-dimensional instrument, and performance – which indeed is part of the point. What one might call Boulez’s toccata tendency engaged with symmetries that were not fearful but apparently fearless: testament to performance as well as to work.

As a welcome post-concert treat, those of us who wished were invited to a performance of Anthèmes 1 and Anthèmes 2 by Michael Barenboim, the latter with IRCAM electronics. I have written recently about a Barenboim performance of Anthèmes 2; this was perhaps still more confident, and certainly had one listening with new ears in new context. It was fascinating to hear the earlier ‘version’, if one may it that, and I think in context one may, and to reflect on the expansion – not unlike that of Incises into sur Incises – of a solo work that inevitably has one think of Bach as surely as Mémoriale does of Syrinx. That, and Barenboim’s excellent performance, certainly heightened structural awareness, whilst the sonic tapestry seemed almost, doubtless misleadingly, to take care of itself. Such, after all, is part of the business of performance; once again, art concealed art and yet never forgot its performative nature, just as Boulez had intended when emphatically returning to electronic music in Répons. More on that, later in the year, from Salzburg…

Berlin Festtage (3) - Staatskapelle Berlin/Barenboim, et al., Boulez, 29 March 2015

Philharmonie

Le Visage nuptial

Anthèmes 2
Notations I, III, IV, VII, II (piano and orchestral versions)

Mojca Erdmann (soprano)

Anna Lapkovskaja (mezzo-soprano)

Ladies of the MDR Choir and NDR Choir (chorus masters: James Wood and Bernhard Epstein)

Michael Barenboim (violin)

Carlo Laurenzi and Jérémie Henriot (sound and live electronics, developed and realised at IRCAM)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (piano, conductor)

Boulez’s Le Visage nuptial remains a rare feast in every sense. It can certainly rarely have received a more ravishing performance, even when conducted by the composer. Mojca Edrmann, Anna Lapkovskaja, and the ladies of the MDR and NDR choruses, under Daniel Barenboim gave a first-class account, which must surely have won new converts both to work and composer. There can be few more inviting examples of Boulez’s Klee-inspired heterophony, geometrical (yet fantastical) surrounding of an ‘orginal’ line with others, even this relatively early work, revisions notwithstanding, paving the way for later masterpieces such as sur Incises. Perhaps the opening of the first movement, ‘Conduite’, acts as a primer in miniature for such method; so, at least, did it seem here, following the opening orchestral éclat, and the entry of ecstatic female solo voices, Erdmann very much the daring high soprano, Lapkovskaia’s rich mezzo often suggestive of a true(r) contralto. Shimmering strings after René Char’s words, ‘O ma Fourche, ma Soif anxieuse’ inevitably suggested the (post-)coital. Not the least aspect of this work is Boulez’s remarkably insightful exploration of female sexuality. Brief flowering of Messiaenesque rhythm in the final stanza both nodded to and expressed distance from Boulez’s teacher. Post-Debussyan languor was the order of the day in the beautifully-ordered – how could it be otherwise?! – after-glow of ‘Gravité’. Barenboim’s shaping and balancing was spot on throughout, the chorus almost sounding as if a (pre-)electronic halo for solo voices, offering a presentiment of Anthèmes 2, following the interval. Messiaen again sprang to mind, again distanced, in the choral writing of the central ‘Le Visage nuptial’ itself. But soon, Bergian intensity – partly a matter of the composer’s revisions, partly something that was always there, even whilst he doubted late Berg’s taste for ‘reconciliation’, partly a matter of the particular orchestra and conductor – supplemented and questioned that. Controlled frenzy from the superlative percussion, and the rest of the orchestra, made for a truly thrilling ride, the sweetness of the Staatskapelle Berlin violins not the least of these heavenly, yet earthly, delights. After Parsifal the night before, it was as if Kundry had truly returned – and turned the tables. The subsiding of the movement prior to its final ecstatic burst was, again, expertly shaped by Barenboim. ‘Evadné’ offered psalmodic choral chanting as response, with the final ‘Post-Scriptum’ framing the narrative, such as it is, very nicely with the return of the excellent soloists. The fragility of the close once again proved suggestive in every sense.

The Philharmonie proved in many ways a splendid venue for Anthèmes 2, the live electronic shadowing of Michael Barenboim’s violin (expertly provided by Carlo Laurenzi and Jérémie Henriot) a showcase for a crucial aspect of Boulez’s later style. The kinship between earlier celestial choir and this proved striking, although Mephistophelian sniping (Liszt’s shadow?) was not to be denied either. Sweet post-Messiaenesque lines enhanced and were enhanced by occasional nods to an older, almost viol-like string tradition. This was a performance of which Barenboim fils could justly be proud – infinitely superior to the sorry state of Gidon Kremer’s violin technique three nights later (more on that in a subsequent review).

Barenboim père returned to the podium, with piano, for Notations. First, he offered a spoken introduction to the pieces (with piano and orchestral examples), the idea of Veränderung rightly to the fore. (Again, I thought of Liszt, still more of Wagner.) Each piano version preceded its orchestral child. If the piano versions were not always the most polished, and would in themselves be superseded by Michael Wenderberg’s superlative performances the following night, they did what they were supposed to, in spiritedly showing whence the orchestral versions had originated. Berg again came to mind in III (Très modéré); indeed, it was a (putative) brand of Klangfarbenmelodie related to him, perhaps, rather than to Schoenberg and Webern, that seemed the hallmark of that intriguing performance. There was, moreover, more than a soupçon of Debussyan awakening, in all its rich ambiguity. The Seventh, marked ‘Hiératique’, proved on a different scale in every sense to its predecessors, almost musico-dramatic in a Wagnerian and/or Mahlerian sense. Air from Debussy’s and Bartók’s planets vied with that of more Germanic ‘tradition’. For Boulez’s later serialism, this seemed an equivalent to Schoenberg’s Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene. As usual, the closing (for now) Second Notation offered a riotous conclusion – to an immaculately planned concert.

 

Berlin Festtage (1) - Schütz/VPO/Barenboim - Boulez and Schubert

Philharmonie

Boulez – Livre pour cordes

Mémoriale
Originel
Schubert – Symphony no.9 in C major, ‘Great’, D 944

Karl-Heinz Schütz (flute)

Christina Bauer, Noid Haberl (electronics)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

 

No encore, although the audience would clearly have liked one; more to the point, there was a non-advertised late addition to the programme at the beginning. Daniel Barenboim came to the podium and announced that the concert would begin with the Air from Bach’s Orchestral Suite in D major, BWV 1068. Beautiful without affectation, it was a more eloquent mark of respect to those who had lost their lives in the German Wings aeroplane crash than any words. It was not a performance to be ‘reviewed’, but it should be noted.

 

The Vienna Philharmonic strings then launched more or less immediately – though not without unwanted applause, dealt with admirably by Barenboim – into Boulez’s Livre pour cordes. Barenboim’s reading proved, like his Wagner and much else, both spacious and keenly dramatic. I was struck how close the music sounded at times to Bartók. The players, coaxed into playing ‘New Music’, offered crucial subtlety in dynamic gradation and transition; to give an example, the eight double basses’ pizzicato playing was not only admirable in its unanimity but in its acceleration of impetus, driving the music forward just as it might in Beethoven. The piece emerged almost as if a tone poem (of ‘absolute music’).

Mémoriale benefited from another performance of what one might call warm precision: very much akin with much of Boulez’s own later conducting work. Perfect coordination between the magnificent flautist, Karl-Heinz Schütz, and the Vienna strings – interplay and counterpoint, echoes and collision – led us into a beguiling labyrinth indeed. The subtle yet crucial contribution of the horns should also be noted, not least at the end, fading exquisitely into nothingness. Those horns – and their players, or their instruments, according to one’s understanding! – then moved to the other side of the stage, quickly joined by other wind instruments. Two more flautists stood on either side, awaiting the return of Schütz and Barenboim for Originel. But first, Barenboim said a few words, explaining that we should now hear the same material in another Besetzung, referring to Boulez’s love for complexity and kinship both with Mahler and the orchestral Notations. (Difficult to argue with any of that!) The pairing proved genuinely rewarding, both for the mind and the senses. From the presence of clarinets at the opening, soon joined by electronics (Christina Bauer and Noid Haberl, developed and realised at IRCAM), and then the first of the two additional flute Kinder (Barenboim’s term), similarity and difference not only presented themselves but ravished. I wished I could have heard it all again, and that we might have heard any number of other potential versions.

Whilst the connection with Schubert was not overt, the care that Barenboim took to make ‘New’ Music classical and ‘old’ music new was once again clear; so was the superlative playing of the VPO. The introduction to the first movement sounded simply glorious, but more than that, it proved in spirit quite the most Furtwänglerian account I have heard in concert. There was, needless to say, none of that absurd ‘same tempo as the exposition’ nonsense. This was an experience that was mystical in the best sense. The Vienna horns, the oboe, pretty much everything – all sounded to die for. Even the depth of the violas’ sound could not help but strike, could not help but draw one in to the incipient, inexorable drama. But there was no more wallowing in beauty for its own sake than there had been in Boulez. Dark menace was a hallmark of the strings throughout the movement, always in alliance with harmonic motion; indeed, as time went on, the ghost of Klemperer sounded almost as present as that of Furtwängler, just as in much of Barenboim’s recent Beethoven. And indeed there was an almost Beethovenian purpose to the course of the movement, tension between and beneath the notes inescapable. What struck me at the end of the coda was not ‘heavenly length’ but apparent concision.

The Andante con moto was perfectly judged, both parts of the tempo marking honoured. If the oboe solo was undoubtedly exquisite, so were contributions from all of the woodwind. So too was the string playing, sounding new in the light of the Boulez works. Barenboim’s build up to the great climax was both Brucknerian and not, never uncharacteristic. I was left feeling bereft and yet, in the light of the cellos’ song in aftershock, also (potentially) reconciled. The Scherzo’s opening material was played with rustic swagger: more than the odd reminiscence of Haydn. Line, orchestral balance, and, not least, grace were equal partners in crime here. Grace certainly suffused the lovely, yet never too lovely, Trio. It relaxed – out of symphonic necessity. And yet, the harmony ever pushed us forward. There could be no arguing with the heft of the finale, nor, more importantly, with its tension and release. This was a finale truly worthy of the name. It was not only that its thrills were both visceral and intellectual; the performance showed that the two could not be separated. Likewise motivic life in inner parts and the grinding harmonic motion in the bass. If there has been a greater performance of this symphony since Colin Davis in Dresden, maybe even since Karl Böhm, I have not heard it.

 

Prom 10: Eisa/WEDO/Barenboim (2) - Beethoven and Boulez, 21 July 2012

Royal Albert Hall

Beethoven – Symphony no.4 in B-flat major, op.60

Boulez – Dialogue de l’ombre double
Beethoven – Symphony no.3 in E-flat major, ‘Eroica’, op.55

Jussef Eisa (clarinet)

Gilbert Nouno (IRCAM computer music designer)

Jérémie Henrot (IRCAM sound engineer)

West-Eastern Divan Orchestra

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

Images: BBC/Chris Christodoulou
Daniel Barenboim conducts the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in Beethoven's
Fourth Symphony at the BBC Proms

This second instalment of the Beethoven symphonies from Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra reversed the chronological order, so that the Fourth was to be heard in the first half, along with Boulez’s Dialogue de l’ombre double, with the second half given over to the Eroica. Fair enough, one might say, the latter symphony being an obvious work with which to conclude the programme. I wondered whether it might therefore have made sense to mix up the programming a little more, rather than to present an almost-but-not-quite chronology, but any ordering will possess its particular advantages. As it was, even though the Fourth came first, I could not help but hear it to a certain degree in the light of what was yet to come.

Its first-movement introduction sounded deliciously dark, spacious, mysteriously flowing in a fashion that almost inevitably brought Barenboim’s hero, Furtwängler to mind. Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit? The transition was thrillingly navigated to a spruce, well-articulated, yet dramatically charged exposition. Six double basses marked a larger orchestra than that employed for the First and Second Symphonies (with four), but somehow there was already a sense of slight scaling down from the Eroica we had not yet heard; and so it would come to pass, with eight players after the interval. There was an occasional slight thinness to the WEDO’s string tone, not simply to be ascribed to numbers or the acoustic, and especially if one had in the back of one’s mind Barenboim’s recording with the Staatskapelle Berlin, but for the most part this was cultured, cultivated playing. More important was an ever-present sense of teleology, without which Beethoven makes no sense whatsoever. Equally crucial, indeed indissolubly interlinked, were rhythmic propulsion and the concision that is such a hallmark of this symphony and this movement in particular. There was an abiding sense of the processional – ghosts of the French Revolution? – to the slow movement, woodwind rightly to the fore. What a joy it was to hear again after the years of ‘authenticke’ terror a Beethoven in which the metronome played no part; music in the sense of score and performance progressed according to its own requirements and possibilities. It was as free and goal-oriented as one might expect from Barenboim in one of the piano sonatas. Other ghosts – the Eroica, late Haydn – haunted the sterner moments; humanity and the present always won through, with woodwind playing of truly heart-stopping beauty. The scherzo sounded as a successor to the funeral games of its Eroica counterpart: athletic, heroic, what the Olympics might be, were their vile commercialism to be jettisoned. There was a ‘traditional’ slowing for the trio, rightly pointing to its premonitory kinship with the Seventh. The finale was certainly swift, but also graceful, Haydn’s example far from banished – and why should it be? By turns lithe and muscular, this exuded vitality.

Jussef Eisa performs Boulez's Dialogue de l'ombre double at the BBC Proms

Boulez’s Dialogue de l’ombre double, performed by Jussef Eisa with IRCAM design from lbert Nouno and sound engineering from Jérémie Henrot, received a revelatory performance: an achievement from any musician, let alone a clarinettist so young. The Royal Albert Hall came into its own here, the ‘double shadow’ enveloping the audience – amongst whom, there were, sadly, a few disruptive influences – and evoking all manner of historical resonances from plainsong versicle and response in a great basilica to Boulez’s own Répons. The relationship between ‘original’ and electronic sound was by turn blurred and rendered clear, intelligent lighting adding a helpful visual element. Truly magical passages of transition between strophes provided some of the many highlights. Eisa – and Boulez! – offered arabesques of ravishing beauty, delivered with a virtuosity that would surely have impressed Berio, to whom the score is dedicated, though here the virtuosity tends towards a more gentle kind than is essayed in the Sequenzas. I was also put in mind of Nono’s Venetian evocations, whilst the spatial movement of electronic sounds, at some points almost dizzyingly fairground-like, sounded as if transformed Gabrieli or Monteverdi. This was a remarkable performance of a remarkable work, which survived coughing, sneezing, chattering, even the man next to me who insisted on eating his sandwiches.


The first movement of the Eroica took a little while to get into its stride, the only (relative) disappointment to the concert. Accents, surprisingly for Barenboim, sounded a little over-emphasised, more akin to the artificial ‘excitement’ lesser musicians impose upon Beethoven. Counterpoint, however, was clear and harmonically propulsive, and momentary apparent desertion from Furtwängler’s path was put right with yearning voicing – and working – of the second subject. The magic tended to be reserved for hushed moments, at least until echt-Beethovenian defiance was voiced in the recapitulation. Gloriously apparent was the status of the coda as second development – perhaps a link, despite the formal perfection of Beethoven’s scheme, to the open-endedness integral to Boulez’s æsthetic. Klemperer, hewn from granite, remains the model for so many of us in the Funeral March, but Barenboim’s more fluid approach more than justified itself. There was some especially fine playing from the WEDO’s woodwind principals. The episodes unabashedly evoked Furtwängler, not just in their shaping but in their organic growth from existing material. Nobility of utterance verged upon the supreme. This was Wagnerian Beethoven, and all the better for it; several times I heard intimations of Die Walküre. Wagner’s 1851 programmmatic explanation of this symphony came to mind:

... the term ‘heroic’ must be taken in the widest sense, and not simply as relating to a military hero. If we understand ‘hero’ to mean, above all, the whole, complete man, in possession of all purely human feelings — love, pain, and strength — at their richest and most intense, we shall comprehend the correct object, as conveyed to us by the artist in the speaking, moving tones of his work. The artistic space of this work is occupied by … feelings of a strong, fully formed individuality, to which nothing human is strange, and which contains within itself everything that is truly human.

I wonder whether I heard the scherzo differently, following that of the Fourth. At any rate, Beethoven’s life-force was wonderfully apparent. The Romantic grandeur of those horns announcing the trio acted as a reminder that Der Freischütz is not so very far away. Beethoven’s finale followed on with truly musico-dramatic inevitability, as did each variation from its predecessor. Beethoven cannot be given with cynicism, yet our own, cynical age needs him more than ever. I doubt that any musician today could square that circle as well as Barenboim. The very existence of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra stands as testament to that.