Shibe and friends - Dillon, Miller, and Boulez, 29 May 2025

Wigmore Hall

James Dillon: 12 Caprices (world premiere)
Cassandra Miller: Bel Canto
Boulez: Le Marteau sans maître

Sean Shibe (guitar)

Ema Nikolovska (mezzo-soprano)

Adam Walker (flute)

George Barton, Iris van den Bos, Sam Wilson (percussion)

Emma Wernig (viola)

Matthew Hunt (clarinet)

Mira Benjamin (violin)

Colin Alexander (cello)

Alphonse Cemin (conductor)

In this excellent Wigmore Hall concert for Boulez’s centenary year, Sean Shibe and friends, mezzo Ema Nikolovska first among equals, demonstrated once again the stature, challenge, and thrills of what arguably remains the composer’s signature work, Le Marteau sans maître. ‘Without feeling close to Boulez’s music,’ Stravinsky wrote to Nadia Boulanger in 1957, ‘I frankly find it preferable to many things of his generation.’ And we can certainly tend to think of it – almost unavoidably – in terms of music and musicians that had led up to it. Take its Asia-tilted percussion, strongly recalling Messiaen’s Trois petites liturgies (for which Boulez turned vibraphone pages at the 1945 premiere), here magically brought to life by George Barton, Iris van den Bos, and Sam Wilson; the crossing and continuation of lines between instruments, immediately apparent here in the first of the work’s nine movements, inevitably reminiscent of Webern, the serialist ‘threshold’; or the mesmerising, even Mozartian ravishment of the third ‘Commentaire’ on ‘Bourreaux de solitude’. (In the latter case, I am sure Così fan tutte did not actually play a role here, but I like to fancy that the older Boulez, recording that extraordinary, unexpected Ensemble Intercontemporain performance of the Serenade, KV 361/370a, alongside Berg’s Chamber Concerto, might nonetheless have subsumed it into his aesthetic realm.) Here, though, we looked, or rather listened, forward, if retrospectively, the first half presenting the world premiere of James Dillon’s 12 Caprices for solo guitar and Cassandra Miller’s 2010 Maria Callas homage, Bel Canto. 

Not having heard Le Marteau for a while – my most recent live encounter might actually have been eight years ago in Vienna – I experienced the joy of rediscovery, but also of that increasing sense in Boulez’s œuvre more widely of taking a place in the great modernist ‘museum’ to which he felt such ambivalent attraction. This is not ‘pointillist’ music, far from it, but using that as a starting-point for exploration, not least that connection of instrumental and vocal lines mentioned above, seemed fitting or at least not entirely absurd in the progress of this performance and the material on which it is founded. ‘Avant “L’Artisanat furieux”’ felt that way, anyway, its archetypal ‘exquisite labyrinth’ becoming ever more involved, conductor Alphonse Cemin and the ensemble equally ensuring there was no loss to visceral experience, no smoothing of the edges. Rhythm, as in Stravinsky, continued to drive. In similar spirit, flute and voice melismata (Adam Walker and Nikolovska) almost yet not quite combined in ‘L’Artisanat furieux’. As Boulez’s serial universe thereafter unfolded, an angrier presentiment perhaps of Pli selon pli, development seemed to occur as much retrospectively as in ‘order’. Relaxation had something splendidly disorienting to it, as if swimming uphill in waters unknown. Process in all its volatility could be felt, even if one could not – should not – put it into words. Throughout, one felt wholehearted commitment from the musicians: not only sure and knowing, but vividly exploratory guides to our ears. An invisible theatre, especially apparent in the two closing movements, welcomed to its stage ghosts from the past: a Pierrot-like line on Emma Wernig’s viola, or Debussyan arabesque upon arabesque incited and invited by Walker’s flute. This was above all music for now, resisting the museum even as it entered in. 

Dillon’s Caprices put me in mind, perhaps coincidentally, but the coincidence was strong, of Boulez’s own piano Notations, similarly aphoristic and twelve in number. Perhaps it was only this context that led me to think that way, but gesture and substance in the very first seemed to come from a related sound-world and mind. They then pursued their own path, of course, offering plentiful space for finely wrought, idiomatic guitar-writing and committed performance. Each caprice laid claim both to individual character in kaleidoscopic variety, and also to a strong sense of progression within the whole. Work and performance alike drew one in, in spellbinding fashion. Quoted in the programme as speaking of ‘a framing of the fugitive’, Dillon brought that Lorca-founded image to spellbinding if swiftly vanishing life, with outstanding advocacy from Shibe. 

In Bel Canto, Nikolovska and two mini-ensembles, one with her onstage, the other behind and above in the balcony, brought to life not only Callas’s ‘Vissi d’arte’, but the passage of time in her career: ‘not only’, in Miller’s words, ‘about the ageing of an extraordinary woman, but also about the listener. Time slows down to allow for an engagement with detail, for a submersion in the sound, and for meditative stillness.’ That is very much what we experienced, time slowing, even near-repeating, as if a record were stuck; and yet, it moved. There was something dream-like, even epiphanic to Nikolvska and the instrumentalists’ revelation, yet whatever one might have felt, there was nothing vague to it, their means as precise as, say, Berio’s layering in his Folk Songs or, indeed, Sinfonia, be they written or left to the performers’ judgement. The midway surprise of an unseen Romantic violin solo from behind (Mira Benjamin), vying in richness with Nikolovska’s voice, ever changing yet ever the same, registered as an invisible coup de théâtre, a prelude to sounds hitherto unimagined yet making perfect sense when they came. Not entirely unlike Le Marteau, one might say, although unmistakeably of the Mediterranean.

London Sinfonietta/Volkov: James Dillon, Stabat mater dolorosa, 21 January 2015

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Stabat mater dolorosa (London premiere)

BBC Singers
London Sinfonietta
Sound Intermedia
Ilan Volkov (conductor)

James Dillon’s ‘cantata’ – his own description – Stabat mater dolorosa had its first performance at last November’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival; this was its London premiere. Co-commissioned by the HCMF, BBC Radio 3, and Casa da Musica, Porto, it is quite unlike any ‘setting’ of the poem I have heard, despite the surprising direct quotation from Pergolesi that surfaces some way through its hour-and-a-quarter duration. Why the inverted commas? Only some of the poem is set; apparently, Dillon went so far as he felt able and then stopped. Perhaps more importantly, the text is not always readily audible; more than once, I thought of Nono’s Il canto sospeso, and indeed of Stockhausen’s (misplaced?) criticism of it in Die Reihe: the effect seemed somewhere between Nono’s intention and Stockhausen’s reception, albeit with a far greater sense of restraint. However, there were times when the text was readily audible, for which considerable praise should be offered to the BBC Singers.

The background ‘chatter’ of ancillary texts is deliberately not perceptible in its detail, presenting an interesting comparison and indeed synergy with the relatively sparing use of electronics. Picasso’s idea of the ‘weeping woman’ melds with the philosopher Julia Kristeva’s Héretique de l’amour, a text in which she considers the Stabat mater in relation to her experience of child birth and her thoughts upon the Virgin Birth. (I am relying on Dillon for that information, since I have yet to read any Kristeva.) Rilke’s Visions of Christ and Donne’s A Valediction of Weeping are also present. We only know that because we are told. Does that matter? I am instinctively suspicious (reactionary that I am?) of conceptual art, but in this case, I really could see no harm, nor could I hear it, in a little background – in more than one sense. The idea of a ‘canonical’ text, a term Dillon used more than once in a brief post-concert discussion, being mediated by later writing is after all difficult to avoid in any non-fundamentalist consideration of texts as developing works.

The score really does, rather to my surprise, come across as a reimagining of a Baroque cantata. One senses something akin to ritornello form and sub-divisions not entirely dissimilar to those of the old ‘cantata mass’. (Perhaps incongruously, perhaps not, it was Haydn’s post-Baroque Missa Cellensis in honorem Beatissimae Virginis Mariae that sprang to my mind both during and after the event.) Picasso’s ‘weeping machine’ and what one might think of its predecessors in earlier Spanish painters such as Murillo also featured strongly in my initial response. To quote the composer, whom I read afterwards, ‘Picasso’s strange but fascinating metaphor of a “weeping machine” becomes a central image in the work, whereby I cast the mechanics of mourning as a slow machine, a music which unfolds in slow motion.’ That ‘slow motion’ might take some getting used to, but actually one’s ears adjust – or at least mine did – reasonably quickly. There are moments, passages of considerable beauty, not entirely unlike Baroque obbligati. Various instrumentalists from the splendid London Sinfonietta took their opportunities to shine, without any hint of standing out too boldly. Alastair Mackie’s trumpet lingered especially in the memory. The caesuras challenged too, but productively: there still seemed to be an overarching modernist structure, rather than a mere post-modernist assemblage for us to make of what we would.

The work clearly requires more than a single listening, so I am reluctant to say much more, but I have little doubt that such listening would be well rewarded. Insofar as I could tell, Ilan Volkov directed his forces with remarkable sympathy and understanding. The London Sinfonietta has long excelled in such repertoire; long may that excellence continue.