Barenboim/Nouno - Boulez, Attahir, Manoury, Chaker, and Roustom, 12 October 2025

Purcell Room

Boulez: Anthèmes 1
Benjamin Attahir: Retour à Tipasa
Philippe Manoury: Partita II
Layale Chaker: Before bloom
Kareem Roustom: Pavane (pour les enfantes défuntes) (UK premiere)
Boulez: Anthèmes 2

Michael Barenboim (violin, viola)

Gilbert Nouno (live electronics)

Michael Barenboim’s Sunday afternoon Purcell Room concert, given with Gilbert Nouno, offered not only a welcome new standpoint to the Boulez centenary celebrations, but also the United Kingdom premiere of Kareem Roustom’s Pavane (pour les enfantes défuntes), for viola and live electronics, Barenboim’s own commission for ‘something for the children of Gaza’. Words, music, money, anything at all may seem hopelessly insufficient in the face of genocide, and of course they are. That does not mean, though, that we should not bear witness as we can. Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw does not efface, let alone undo, what was done, nor does it intend to. Extending his father’s humanitarianism and indeed as much in the tradition of Edward Said, co-founder of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, Michael Barenboim, the orchestra’s longstanding concertmaster, has consistently shown great courage in doing so in the face of implacable opposition from German media and the German state. Indeed, to have given the work’s world premiere in Berlin just under a year ago, in the rare friendly space of the city’s Pierre Boulez Saal, was itself an act of witness. 

An opening cry, far from histrionics, yet all the more powerful for it, spoke of something more fundamental—in more than one sense. Roustom’s piece takes its leave, of course, from Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte, and specifically the absurdism of its title, an absurdism we have seen and heard, via Beckett and the debris of post-Holocaust art, inflicted on children in Gaza and beyond. Neither overtly representational nor overtly abstract, its hope in some sense to speak, perhaps to sing, despite and through trauma seemed woven into both piece and performance, as well as to our necessary reactions. That it ultimately approached Ravel and his piece themselves, without the slightest incongruence, itself seemed both absurd and necessary, electronics creating a strange piano echo of their own.   

In a carefully planned programme, this Pavane stood as a counterpart to the first-half Retour á Tipasa for violin and electronics, by Boulez pupil (at the Lucerne Festival Academy) Benjamin Attahir, also following on meaningfully from Layale Chaker’s Before a bloom for solo viola. Both works bridged, like Roustom’s, ‘East’ and ‘West’, not in a banal cross- or inter-culturalism, but as a natural form of expression. The opening éclat – that indispensable Boulezian quality – of Attahir’s work, a dazzling pizzicato figure, was immediately bathed, magnified, and transformed in dialogue with an electronic penumbra that offered more of a sense of aural landscape, though not only that, than Boulez would have been likely to consider. North African melodic and rhythmic inflections – to our ears, they may sound Scottish, but that is our problem – evoke or hail, again without mere representation, the Punic-Roman-Algerian port of Tipasa. Shifting relationships between solo instrument and electronics, as well as a clear, dramatic overall trajectory bore their own witness: not necessarily one to be put into words, but no less important for that. Likewise, in Chaker’s solo piece, whose pizzicato ‘accompaniment’ and solo arco line – it is more complicated than that, but perhaps not entirely – seemed to me strangely, expressively to echo the world of Bartók’s rhapsodies for violin and piano. Originally composed for cello, it showed no obvious sign of transcription, benefiting from rich, variegated viola playing and, again, unfailing sense of overall line. 

Philippe Manoury’s Partita II for violin and electronics came across as effortlessly – however much art conceals art – conceived for violin, electronics, and their joint capabilities: as ‘natural’ as Chopin writing for piano, or Mahler for orchestra. A magical realm of precision, consequence, and highly expressive potential and achievement radiated, Boulez-like, from the ‘solo’ instrument, although it is far from clear that  ‘influence’ or at least inspiration, may not have run as much in the opposite direction.  Both like and unlike a violin concerto, its nine stands’ worth of music was full of surprises that were anything but arbitrary, Barenboim’s virtuosity here as elsewhere so clearly in the service of the music one might readily overlook it—yet should not. 

Opening and closing the programme were Boulez’s own Anthèmes 1 and Anthèmes 2, the former for solo violin, the latter its expansion for violin and electronics. In both, Barenboim – and Boulez – made crystal clear from the outset the nature and contrasts of the musical material: the figure from his …explosante-fixe… ‘kit’, treated in almost sequential yet never predictable variation, and single notes of long duration. It was their story, told in illuminated style that recalled old ‘anthems’ on the acrostic Lamentations of Jeremiah, consecutive Hebrew letters beginning each verse. (Recall also Stravinsky’s Threni.) Performed with a keen, yet never remotely flashy sense of drama, the works’ structure became form before our eyes and ears. Serial-Bachian procedures redolent of the Musical Offering and Art of Fugue, especially in Anthèmes 2, evoked the instrument’s past and perhaps its future, proliferation pointing toward an apparent eternity. Musical rays shone outwards from the violin; at other times, the instrument sounded as if a single ray, albeit the brightest, from within a spectrum. This is not spectralist music, far from it, yet the distance may not prove so great as many of us may have thought. I was struck anew by surprisingly Messiaenesque harmony at its centre, by the singular use of electronics in ‘real time’, by the music’s multi-dimensionality. It felt as if the pages of Anthèmes 1 had been opened, their notes, numbers, metaphorical flowers turning to the sun—and then away from it, inspired, emboldened, given new life. There may or may not be hope, but there is still music.

Neuburger/Boulez Ensemble/Roth - Debussy and Manoury, 29 October 2023

Pierre Boulez Saal

Debussy: Sonata for flute, viola, and harp
Manoury: Passacaille pour Tokyo
Debussy: Sonata for cello and piano
Manoury: Grammaires du sonore

Jean-Frédéric Neuburger (piano)

Boulez Ensemble

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

Images: Jakob Tillmann

Intelligent and revealing programming is always a joy. François-Xavier Roth ranks highly among those conductors regularly offering it. When married to equally intelligent and revealing performances it becomes all the more a joy, such as in this concert from the Boulez Ensemble, founded by Daniel Barenboim to include members of the Staatskapelle Berlin and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Two ensemble pieces by Philippe Manoury were prefaced by two late Debussy sonatas, the formal implications of which were highly suggestive and felt to be such for the Manoury works. 

First, we heard Debussy’s Sonata for flute, viola, and harp, an extraordinary work I do not think I have ever heard live before. The combination may be unusual, but surely is not that difficult to assemble; even if it were, it would be well worth the effort. Hélène Freyburger (flute), Yulia Deyneka (viola), and Aline Khouri (harp) struck an ideal balance from the outset between solo and ensemble. The first movement in particular was possessed of a magical inscrutability through which secrets were gradually revealed, first among them the quiet radicalism of Debussy’s reinvention of the sonata, quite without resort to what would become (arguably was just becoming) neoclassicism. For Debussy’s treatment of material already began to peer forward to Boulez and even to Manoury. The Interlude, somehow both darker and brighter, registered with proper contrast. Debussy’s use of the harp fascinated all the more in performance, as it encouraged the viola and, perhaps to a slightly lesser extent, the harp to expand their means, and initiated transformations of material and mood. Likewise in the finale, beginning in almost ‘classical’ style before taking other paths, not necessarily sequential: another anticipation of the future, bringing Birtwistle as well as Boulez to my mind.

 

The piano moved centre-stage to Manoury’s 1994 Passacaille pour Tokyo, for piano and seventeen instruments. A similar reinvention of an old form, albeit with more overt éclat, is here founded upon repetition of a note, first E-flat, to which we feel a need to return and indeed continue to hear even when the actual note of repetition has changed. It offers proliferation in a way that recalls Boulez, as it were, from the other end, without the slightest sense of mere imitation. Jean-Frédéric Neuburger’s insistence on the initial E-flat, varying duration and attack, set the scene for an excellent performance of the whole. Manoury’s music glittered and glistened, never glowering, in a fantastical realm of invention. I had a sense of constant transformation even when, on a single hearing, I could not always tell you how, but the relation of this new passacaglia-idea to the old piano device of a pedal-point (or more than one) became clearer as time progressed, all the while as material was thrilling passed between instruments, like high-speed Webern, though in many more directions. The advent of ‘shadow piano’, played offstage by Kyoko Nojima, was arresting in more than a merely spatial sense. Inevitably, perhaps, it died away on a single pitch, on Neuburger’s piano, but the abiding memory was as much of the delightful friction between repetition, even varying repetition, and persistent transformation above.

 

Neuburger was joined by cellist Alexander Kovalev for Debussy’s Cello Sonata, a dark, declamatory piano opening both picked up and transformed by cello playing (and writing) combining strength and elegy. Here was another different conception of the sonata, as if to remind us that Liszt’s declaration that new wine demanded new bottles was the afternoon’s motto; in many ways indeed it was. The variety of expressive articulation offered by both players, even within a single phrase, encapsulated not only a marriage of detail and greater sweep but also the concert’s conception of form springing from material. Pierrot-like whimsy and invention characterised the opening of the ‘Sérénade et Finale’. The mutual approach of instruments, for instance through piano marcato and cello pizzicato, prepared the way for a sense of controlled intoxication; that is, there were certainly limits, yet within those limits, a great deal could and did happen. Not unlike Manoury’s Passacaille, one might say.

 

Barenboim arrived after the interval, with what I assume was the score of the next piece, which he proceeded to follow assiduously seated next to the composer. Manoury’s Grammaires du sonore was premiered by Roth and the Ensemble Intercontemporain last December in Paris. It made a huge impression on me here in Berlin—and, so far as I could tell, on the audience assembled at the Pierre Boulez Saal. A fuller ensemble here seemed not only to reinvent the modern ensemble’s reinvention of the symphony orchestra, but also, more radically, not only to question but magically to cast away its hierarchies in a riot of what went beyond Debussy’s controlled intoxication to post-Boulezian controlled delirium. Here, it seemed, there was a place for all to shine, democratically if you will, one of the first being Nina Janßen-Deinzer on contrabass clarinet, the piece seeming to fulfil or at least to renew a promise serialism had never quite been able to realise. Precision and fantasy were dialectically related, as in Boulez. Particular to the piece rather than a universal (was tonality ever really that in any case?), Manoury’s ‘grammar’ both demonstrated and enabled every note, like every word in a poem, truly to count. The fascination of that idea and the excitement of its putting in practice turned our attention back where it should always have been, to musical notes, their performance, their connection, and our listening. For the expression of musical imagination was both highly dramatic and readily perceptible.

Tuned percussion also brought Boulez, perhaps inevitably, a little to mind, yet Manoury’s writing was quite different: less elliptical, perhaps also freer in its exchanged with untuned fellow citizens. Piano writing and Nojima’s performance were perhaps a little closer to ‘traditional’ expectations than what we had heard in the Passacaille, but that was no failing, no retreat, perhaps rather a sign of confidence in the instrument and its place in the ensemble. Brass, save the Wagner tuba, left the floor and went up to the balconies, ricocheting of notes in a layered spatiality expanding dimensions of the relationship between repeated notes and invention in the earlier work. Strings too seemed liberated by their new role, not as first among equals but simply as equals, scintillating, soulful, and much in between, sometimes merging into other sections in an aesthetic and perhaps not entirely apolitical utopia of sound. One chord seemed almost to approach ‘that’ chord in the Adagio of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. It was probably just my fancy, to be refuted were I to look at the score or listen again; yet, in the construction of a grammar to what Mahler might have considered a new world in itself, perhaps it was not entirely so. Debussy’s rethinking of form was honoured and extended, but above all this world dazzled and exhilarated. Crucially for us all now, it held out the promise of life, of a future, of the reinvention, reimagining, and rebuilding we desperately need: not through a didactic manifesto, but through music's delight in itself.

LSO/Roth and others - Lang, Manoury, Shin, and Scriabin, 24 March 2019

Barbican foyers and Barbican Hall

David Lang: the public domain (UK premiere)

Philippe Manoury: Ring (UK premiere)

Donghoon Shin: Kafka’s Dream (world premiere)

Scriabin: The Poem of Ecstasy, op.54

London Symphony Chorus

LSO Community Choir

500 Voices Participants

Simon Halsey (chorus director)

Esmerelda Conde-Ruiz, Emily Dickens, Lucy Griffiths, David Lawrence, Jack Apperley (conductors)

London Symphony Orchestra

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

An excellent concert from the LSO and François-Xavier Roth, prefaced by a more aesthetically dubious enterprise: the UK premiere of David Lang’s the public domain. Let us get that out of the way first. The work, if we can call it that, is designed, according to the composer, ‘for the entire community we live in, so it doesn’t require music professionals, although they are welcome. Performers and audience should be indistinguishable from each other.’ And so on and so forth. Immersive music theatre, however, this was not. What ensued consisted of choruses stationed across the Barbican foyers, shouting and sometimes singing platitudes to music that was, if anything, still more banal. Lang ‘crowdsourced the texts’; they are ‘internet search engine auto-completions of the sentence, “One thing we all have is our…”.’ Alas, he did not use all of them, removing ‘those that referred to specific people, that insulted or praised a person or group, that said anything – good or bad – about a particular religion or nationality or gender … that were pornographic.’ So pretty much anything that might have been of interest, then. Still, even ‘our design/our need/our capacity to choose how we will view the world around us,’ etc., etc., etc. seemed like Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit when compared to the banal chords of Lang’s score. One might point to a spatial element, I suppose, but that would be rather like saying Stockhausen’s Gruppen is like a car park, because people park their cars in different places in that car park. Perhaps there is something more to be said of it, but I shall leave it there. I am sure many of those involved in singing enjoyed the three-quarters of an hour or so it took to get through the twelve parts of whatever it was that was alleged to be going on, and that that was doubtless much of the point. For the audience, though, the motivation to ‘be indistinguishable from each other’ could hardly have stood further from realisation. At least there was opportunity to repair to the bar and continue to try to make something of it with a gin and tonic in hand.

What a relief, then, to enter the Barbican Hall, suitably refreshed, and to hear a performance underway: a performance underway that may or may not have been a ‘real’ performance, depending on one’s standpoint. Here, in another UK premiere, that of Philippe Manoury’s 2013 Ring, there was genuine play both with space and with the bounds of a work and performance, genuine play within a work that enticed and, in an intriguing sense, left one wondering whether this, despite its scale, had been a mere fragment of a greater whole. Music, whatever we mean by that, had certainly begun when we entered the hall. The idea of a notated tuning-up is not new, but what is? This welcomed us not only into the hall, but into the work and its realisation, musicians encircling the audience, forming that ‘ring’ of the title, music coalescing as it had never done in the previous work. When the conductor arrived and began, there was no discernible difference to start with, but rather a visual staging post in still liminal transition, in which occasional strands sounded not unlike snatches of Boulez’s Répons, without ever being reduced to them or displaying undue – or even due – ‘influence’. Was spatial differentiation in itself a form of melody, analogous to timbre in Klangfarbenmelodie? It seemed to be; or rather, might well have been understood as such. Listening and interpretation were open, without being arbitrary. Sounds – music – swirled around us, leading to climaxes as one might traditionally have understood them, and indeed as we should later hear in Scriabin. Material was ever transforming, though never, so it seemed, complete as the aspirant ‘ring’. Sometimes one, or at least I, heard the same figure as more concerned with its repeated pitch, sometimes with rhythm, sometimes with timbre – whilst still, apparently, being the same. Structure was abundantly clear, again not entirely unlike a symphonic work, yet dynamic as form, not entirely unlike a comprehending performance of a symphonic work. For this was a performance from the LSO and Roth in a strong sense. Whatever the theatre, this was music ultimately concerned with ‘itself’.

The world premiere of Donghoon Shin’s Kafka’s Dream followed, its inspiration Jorge Luis Borge’s 1975 poem, Ein Traum, providing a clue even in its title of dreamlike blurring of lines between the imaginary and reality: in itself a connection of sorts between Manoury and Scriabin. For there was a nice doubling of tripartite structure, the two previous parts combined in unexpected, surprising ways, a dream within a dream. Throughout, we heard a keen air for orchestration and for memory, lively rhythms, for instance, ‘remembered’, yet not quite. Thematic development, or something akin to it, was, again as in both preceding and succeeding works, both clearly and dramatically communicated, a solitary unease at its heart, without that necessarily being its point. Shin clearly enjoyed writing for a large orchestra; I enjoyed hearing him do so.

Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy benefited from admirable clarity and a fine balance between the vertical and horizontal. That balance, after all, is surely integral to the work itself; it does not necessarily follow, however, that that is how we always hear it. As in the preceding orchestral works, Roth and the LSO realised structure dynamically as form, here perhaps informed by a Debussyan ear, not least for Allemondian malevolence. A performance that evaded the hothouse entirely would miss the point. This certainly did not, yet there was far more to it than that: a variegation one may well have considered botanical. Climaxes drew lines together: Strauss or Mahler, rather than a Bruckner monolith. I am not a synaesthete, but I fancied that I moved a little closer here, however illusory that sentiment.

Grau-Schumacher Piano Duo - Bach-Kurtág, Busoni, and Manoury, 12 October 2015

Wigmore Hall

Bach, arr. Kurtág – Cantata: Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit, BWV 106: Sonatina

Chorale Prelude: Alle Menschen mussen sterben, BWV 643
Chorale Prelude: Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, BWV 687
Busoni – Fantasia contrappuntisca, BV 256b
Manoury – Le Temps, mode d’emploi (UK premiere)

Andreas Grau, Götz Schumacher (pianos),

Experimental Studio des SWR (José Miguel Fernandez (sound direction), Dominik Kleinknecht (technician))

 

We do not get to hear music for piano duet or for two pianos nearly so often as we should (although yours truly is already looking forward to a date in March with Daniel Barenboim and Martha Argerich). There are many excellent works, and if the duet repertoire is often in some respect ‘players’ music’, it loses little when transferring to the realm of public performance; much the same might, after all, be said about the string quartet, or at least Hans Keller claimed so. It was especially welcome to hear a concert in which a major new work, new to these shores at any rate, was performed – and it could certainly not be considered a work for the private sphere.

 

In the first half, though, we heard two very different sides to the existing repertoire. First, for piano duet, were three of Kurtág’s Bach transcriptions. (I have yet to attend one of his and his wife’s recitals, always having been in the wrong place at the wrong time.) They were well chosen and well played by the GrauSchumacher Piano Duo, treated as piano music, yet retaining their essential – if you will forgive me, just this once, such an ontological assumption – modesty. The Sonatina from the Actus Tragicus might perhaps have been imbued with a greater sense of mourning, but such is of course hardly the fashion today, when we are fortunate to hear Bach played with any manner of gravity at all. The pair of alto recorders sang out beautifully – I am tempted to say rather more beautifully than in ‘real life’ – against a rock-solid ‘continuo’. Two Chorale Preludes once again provoked sadness that this music is so little known outside organ circles; there really is no excuse for any who consider themselves music lovers not to explore its riches. What one can learn from studying the Orgelbüchlein, and what Kurtág undoubtedly must have, his transcription of ‘Alle Menschen müssen sterben’ simple, straightforward, and perhaps all the better for it; that, at least is how it sounded here. The left-hand (in the original) thirds and sixths sounded smooth but not too smooth, as if attempting, and if so successfully, a sense of legato organ-style. The somewhat backward-looking style of ‘Aus Tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir’ showed what nonsense ‘backward’ and ‘forward’ are in Bach’s case, and how irrelevant ‘style’ alone is in any case. Its rhythmic complication, or perhaps better enhancement, of counterpoint shone through clearly and without mannerism.

 

Busoni was thus well prepared. His Fantasia contrappuntistica was here heard, for my first time, I think, in its version for two pianos. Like, on a much smaller scale, the Fifth Sonatina – as close as I shall get to this extraordinary work as a performer in concert – it marries Bach and Busoni in fascinating and unexpected ways. One can tell the difference, then one cannot; one cares, and then one does not. And yet it coheres with more than a hint of Mephistophelian necromancy; indeed, Doktor Faust came to mind on more than one occasion. So did the still surprising harmonic world of the Sonatina seconda, ‘senza tonalità’, so un-Schoenbergian, a tantalising glimpse of worlds that perhaps have yet to be discovered. There were times when I found the players a little stiff, a little short on magic, but there were others in which neo-Lisztian virtuosity swept all before it. Perhaps it is difficult to know how to approach Busoni’s music; it is certainly some of the most scandalously neglected of the twentieth century. Any niggles I might have had were firmly put in their place by gratitude at the opportunity to hear the workings of this grossly-misunderstood compositional – and musicological – mind.

 

I did not consult my watch, but I suspect that Philippe Manoury’s Le Temps, mode d’emploi exceeded three-quarters of an hour, and perhaps did not come so very far from an hour. I say that not as a complaint, nor indeed as praise, Webern turning in his grave, but simply to give an indication of its scale. It was written for Andreas Grau and Götz Schumacher, who with the ever-wonderful Experimentalstudio des SWR, gave what seemed to me a hugely compelling performance, its commitment and, insofar as I could tell, understanding palpable throughout. That this is piano music is never in doubt; there is a joy in exploration of the piano, its capabilities, and its sonorities, often old, and occasionally newer (for instance, by placing a finger on strings inside), which speaks just as it does in the music of Liszt or Busoni. The live electronics are just as important; as Manoury puts it, ‘The two pianos are surrounded by four virtual pianos,’ via ‘a very complex system of sound synthesis, signal processing and spatialisation’. The spatial element cannot help but be felt, of course, and how interesting it is to hear that in the Wigmore Hall, but equally, immediately apparent was its musical quality. Some sort of kinship with what I have thought of as the magic squares of instrumental placing in Boulez’s sur Incises suggested itself, although whether that be simply a sign of my own personal preoccupations I cannot say. Across the span of the work, transformations apparently accomplished, according to Paul Griffiths’s note, by means of Markov chains (‘a process in which movements from one state to another are determined by probabilities’), a dialectic was dramatised, in performance as well as work, between relatively simple, irreducible material (perhaps an arpeggio, bringing Répons, unsurprisingly, to my mind, or a scalic figure) and what sounded to me, trying to make sense of what I heard, as complex yet ‘inevitable’ procedures with respect to tempo, texture, structure, and much else. I half expected the players to begin signalling their decisions to one another, as in the second book of Structures.

 

Indeed, the drama of Manoury’s work possessed a sheer excitement not dissimilar, although – and I do not intend this as a cavil, merely description – it is probably somewhat less concentrated. The possibilities of expansion still inherent in Boulez’s work struck me as, if not entirely, then at least to a greater extent already explored here. The language also sounds more ready to incorporate elements of tonality, perhaps a little after Messiaen, although that I say simply to ‘place’ it, rather than to impute influence. I hope that I shall have opportunity to hear the work, whether from these performers or others, soon, to further an exploration which, for me at least, has only just begun.