Proms Saturday Matinée 4: London Sinfonietta/Fischer - Boulez, Grime, and Mason, 29 August 2015

Cadogan Hall

Boulez – Mémoriale (‘…explosante-fixe…’ Originel)

Helen Grime – A Cold Spring

Boulez – Domaines

Christian Mason – Open to Infinity: A Grain of Sand (United Kingdom premiere)

Boulez – Eclats/Multiples

Michael Cox (flute)

Mark van de Wiel (clarinet)

London Sinfonietta

Thierry Fischer (conductor)

 

And so, the Proms celebration of Pierre Boulez’s music drew to a close. I have previously lamented the lack of Répons, but otherwise, we have much for which to be grateful. Here, three of Boulez’s works were interspersed with works by two admiring young British composers, Helen Grime and Christian Mason.

First up was Mémoriale, hot on the heels of the Albert Hall performance of …explosante-fixe.... It was interesting to hear the two works in close succession, not least since that experience offered a reminder that the ear can sometimes play tricks: is one hearing electronic sounds or not? Clearly not on this occasion, but I might have guessed so, had I not known otherwise. The flute’s trills, the general contours: all were quite familiar by now; yet of course, they sounded different in a different performance (Michael Cox first among London Sinfonietta equals) and in a very different acoustic, that of Cadogan Hall. The ensemble here seemed to offer something of an aural shadow, reminiscent perhaps of Dialogue de l’ombre double. Boulez’s short piece sounded somewhere in between, or rather somewhere beyond, Debussy and Stravinsky, mediated by hints of the Bergian labyrinth. The horns’ final dying away into nothingness was not the least magical moment.

Helen Grime, in conversation with Tom Service, said how struck she had been, even at music college, by Boulez’s ear for harmony and colour. Her ear is formidable too, in no sense replicating, but happy to admit inspiration. The three movements of A Cold Spring (after a poem by Elizabeth Bishop) offer highly virtuosic writing, each having a featured solo instrument or pair of soloists. The first opens teeming with melody, as if paying updated homage to The Rite of Spring, albeit very much in its own voice. I thought also of Schoenberg – a work such as the First Chamber Symphony – in its melodic profusion, although I am unsure whether such associations are merely my affair. The stiller, second movement (‘Calmo’) brought to me a colouristic hint or two of Birtwistle, perhaps a hint too of a melancholy not entirely dissimilar to his. Dark bass lines (cello and double bass) seem to colour the invention above. Calmness is transformed into something else, prior to a final enchantment, blessed, so it seemed, by all instruments, but perhaps especially the harp. The transition to the third movement is led by the double bass, that movement itself sounding very much as a development of what has gone before, not least in its darkness – melody and harmony, as well as its instrumentation.

In Domaines, the number six is prevalent: the clarinettist, here the excellent Mark van de Wiel, plays from six different stands, each with an original page and a ‘mirror’ thereof, each of those twelve pages having six musical fragments, thus totalling seventy-two in all, ranging in length from forty seconds or so to – temporally speaking, at least – little more than the twinkling of an eye. The collision, navigated by the performer, between ritual theatre and a single instrument’s kaleidoscopic array of colours is not the least of the piece’s claims to drama. And that particular instrument, the clarinet, perhaps inevitably has one listen – and, indeed, watch – mindful of kinship with Birtwistle. Indeed, I could not help but think there was something, whether coincidental or otherwise, of Punch and Judy, albeit suaver, to this performance. One would certainly never have guessed the textual complexity of this assemblage of ‘single’ lines in a performance of such  mesmerising musical theatre. Was Boulez’s aspiration – sorry, not in the Liz Kendall sense – to unendliche Melodie even at this stage perhaps born of Wagner (Parsifal at Bayreuth)? And/or Pelléas? Every so often, there seemed also to be an instrumental, even melodic, reminder of Webern. At any rate, score and performance seemed endlessly generative. The idea of ‘mirrors’ offered other, French resonances, whether with respect to Ravel or even old, Baroque ‘doubles’. One could hear, or fancy one heard, such connections, but this was above all Boulez’s own path, the performer’s, and the listener’s.

Open to Infinity: A Grain of Sand (the title, I assume, inspired by Blake) is the second of Christian Mason’s works dedicated to Boulez, and intended as a tribute. As Mason put it, all three movements were as yet at the ‘grain of sand’ stage, but were open to expansion: a highly Boulezian conception. (Boulez acted as mentor to him at Lucerne.) Another nod to Boulez lies in the use by all fourteen players of crotales, intended as a reference to Le Visage nuptial. In each movement, one can hear, even in a first encounter, the varied working out of the same pitch material (almost Berg-like in its audible presence).  The éclat of the first, ‘In a Grain of Sand’, though it could not be mistaken for Boulez, could certainly be heard as homage. The second, ‘In a Wild Flower’, has almost jazzy inflections: perhaps a touch, dare I suggest it, of Boulez’s would-be antipode, Henze? Whatever the truth of that, there is certainly revealed a keen ear for colour and its relationship to rhythm (which, I admit, could equally be inspired by the orchestral Notations: pure speculation on my part). Dramatically insistent figures characterise the third, ‘In the Palm of Your Hand’, with the London Sinfonietta offering, in a true array of colours, all the performative commitment one would expect.

Eclats/Multiples depends upon split-second decisions from the conductor, not the first and certainly not the last of Boulez’s insistence on the importance of performance. It certainly received a splendid performance from the Sinfonietta and Thierry Fischer. The opening piano éclat announced its Messiaenic inheritance; hearing John Constable, one could almost imagine the ghost of Yvonne Loriod. Such resonances, even echoes, again began to make their own way, however: to construct, perhaps even to destroy, and to suggest further creative-destructive connections (whether thinking of the Second Piano Sonata or the endlessly misquoted interview with Der Spiegel). The illusion and the construction of line familiar from Domaines took on new life in ensemble. The ‘pointillism’ of 1950s serialism has generally been exaggerated, give or take an odd Stockhausen piece; this seemed an object lesson in compositional and performative constructivism from the following decade. (Just, one might say, as in Boulez’s conducting of Webern.) It was a joy to meet in new garb old aural friends from the world of Le Marteau sans maître: to know, with hindsight, where they might lead – or not. Why is this wonderful work not more often performed?

 

Boulez Total Immersion, 21 March 2015

Barbican Hall

Piano Sonata no.2

Eclat/Multiples

Notations I, VII, IV, III, and II

Pli selon pli
 
Jean-Frédéric Neuburger (piano)
Yeree She (soprano)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Pablo Rus Broseta, Thierry Fischer (conductors)

The BBC’s Total Immersion series has recently seemed to be running out of steam, offering distinctly underwhelming, and in some cases downright bizarre, repertoire choices. At least it did the right thing here, and honoured in the year of his ninetieth birthday the man who remains not only the single most important Chief Conductor in the history of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, but the abiding presence in post-war music (as I suppose we may still, just about, call it). Alas, I was unable to attend the whole day’s events, which included a pair of films and a lecture by Paul Griffiths, but I managed to hear two out of the three concerts, having to forego an LSO St Luke’s performance from the Guildhall New Music Ensemble and David Corkhill (une page d’éphéméride, Anthèmes 1, Mémoriale (‘…expolsante-fixe…’ Originel), Dérive 1, the Sonatine for flute and piano, and the piano Notations).

The first, lunchtime concert gave decent enough but slightly disappointing performances of two works: the Second Piano Sonata and Eclat/Multiples. When it comes to the former work, I have doubtless been spoilt both by Maurizio Pollini’s legendary recording and the experience of thrice having heard him perform it in concert (in Salzburg, Berlin, and London). This was, however, unless I have forgotten something (unlikely in this case, I think), the first time I had heard Eclat/Multiples ‘live’. The Sonata remains of course a monumental challenge to all who approach it, which is not to say that it is ‘unapproachable’, whatever that might mean. I stand in admiration for any pianist who can so much as play the notes and play them relatively convincingly. Those days Boulez long lamented, when new music suffered so greatly from well-meaning yet, in the pejorative sense, amateurish performances – a situation that led directly to his taking up conducting – are long since passed. Jean-Frédéric Neuburger gave a sense of the piece’s concerns, even, though perhaps only if one knew this already, of its celebrated ‘destruction’ of the idea of the sonata. But the white heat of Pollini’s ultra-commitment, his unerring sense and projection of musical drama, above all his ability not only to maintain a musical line even as the work does its damnedest to obliterate it: I struggled to discern them. Range of expression was ultimately somewhat narrow; undoubted virtuosity astonished less than it should. Above all, Such, perhaps, is the danger attendant to the work’s transformation from New Music rallying cry into ‘classic’. (Boulez’s persistent warnings concerning museum culture remain as urgent as ever.) Beethoven, after all, is destroyed far more by insufficient performances than by Boulez’s apocalyptic reckoning with the example of the Hammerklavier Sonata.

Eclat/Multiples was conducted by Pablo Rus Broseta, who had replaced François-Xavier Roth at short notice. Gratitude is in order, then, and again, to conduct the piece well enough is no mean achievement. However, of the scintillation that Boulez himself has brought to the work – this was the orchestra that gave its first performance, conducted by the composer, in 1970 –was not altogether present, the BBC SO at times sounding less razor-sharp than ideal. Opposition between ‘striated’ and smooth time was present, yet seemed less urgently generative than one might have hoped for. That said, the sense of losing oneself in time remained quite remarkable: a presentiment, perhaps, of Dérive 2? Moreover, hearing the opening piano cascade after the sonata brought to life both what the works have in common and where they differ. Technique and implications of proliferation are very different in nature, even though but a single section of Multiples having been completed, we must still wait to hear the ‘finished’ work. I say ‘even though’, but the near-endless sense of possibility in serial proliferation is something to which Boulez has often drawn attention. Tantalisingly, we read in a 2010 interview for Universal Edition: ‘I would especially like to finish Éclat/Multiples. That’s one of the works which is almost finished, and, you know, I have practically twice the length of the work as I play it now, and therefore I would like to finish because the concept of the end is already there.’ There is much for us to occupy ourselves with in the meantime, though, not least in the composer’s post-Debussyan liberation – perhaps in this case, even exaltation – of timbre. (Those violas, that basset horn! They are emphatically not ‘mere colour’. Klangfarbenmelodie has continued to develop, to expand its realm of possibilities.) Moreover, as Jonathan Goldman has written, ‘Form, once thought by serial composers such as the young Boulez to be equivalent to the exhaustion of the possibilities of the series (a characteristic of none but a single Boulezian creation, the often-analysed Structures Ia), reveals itself in Boulez’s later works to be an open-ended affair.’

For the evening concert, Thierry Fischer was Roth’s replacement. I assume that he must have conducted Notations and Pli selon pli before; they are hardly the sort of works one conducts for the first time at the drop of a hat. Whatever the truth of that, these were assured performances. I doubt that anything will ever eclipse the memory of Boulez’s extraordinary, Bergian performance of Pli selon pli in London four years ago. But one thing that has struck me recently is the greater willingness of other conductors to perform his work. Daniel Barenboim has, of course, long been a champion; I shall soon be reporting from performances in Berlin. Nor is he alone. However, I wonder whether a perverse consequence of Boulez’s pre-eminence as a conductor has been either reluctance or inability – Why would an orchestra hire X to conduct Boulez, when it might enlist the composer himself? – on the part of other musicians to lead performances of his orchestral music. Fischer’s performances proved assured, a worthy tribute, and the BBC SO was on much better form too.

For those who carp about Boulez’s conducting activities allegedly having taken his attention away from composition – they generally seem not to like his music very much, so it is not immediately clear why they should care – the Notations should stand as a rebuke. Boulez himself has owned that he would have been unable to compose the pieces without the experience of conducting Wagner and Mahler. With every listening, that claim becomes more and more unarguable. The virtuosity in orchestral writing is staggering, in its way as much so as that of Ravel, or indeed Mahler. Such was revealed here in performance; it is remarkable what a difference inclusion of the Seventh Notation now makes to the previous first four. As much as Eclat/Multiples, one hears Boulez as, amongst many other things, a true heir to the Viennese purveyors of Klangfarbenmelodie, Schoenberg as much as Webern. This was perhaps the most ‘Romantic’ reading, not only of that movement, but of the work-in-progress as a whole, I have yet to hear. Mahler, perhaps reimagined by the Schoenberg of op.19 no.6, continued as foundational processional, whilst Boulezian fantasy ignited and – that word again – proliferated above. In retrospect, the Boulez of Pli selon pli, especially some of its later revisions, seemed increasingly his own progenitor here. A somewhat deliberate reading of no.4 had me wondering for a while, but won me round; no more than in the music of the ‘museum’ is there one ‘correct’ way to perform this music. Its openness to interpretation is, and should be, at least as great as its openness to further compositional development. The extraordinary Notation II – everyone’s favourite, so far? – brought the house down, as, in my experience, it always has. It threatens to veer out of control, testing the limits of even the most expert orchestra, yet never quite does so. Again, Mahler reimagined. To quote from that 2010 interview for a second time, ‘There’s the Mahler quotation again, “the material composes for you.”’

Pli selon pli proved, as one would have hoped, a fitting climax. If ever there were a Boulez work that seemed to cry out for the word ‘masterpiece’ it must surely be this. Or Le Marteau sans maître, or Répons, or … But, however, over-used that word, here, once again, it seemed fitting. Arnold Whittall’s description of Boulez’s ‘modern classicism’ seemed once more very much the thing; and yet, this work is not so ‘closed’ as it may seem, emphatic though the closing of the circle at the end of ‘Tombeau’ remains. A quality I am almost tempted to call ‘symphonic’ has always been present in the work, but it seems more and more overwhelming, almost ‘tragically’ so. (Perhaps I remain very much – too much? – under Mahler’s spell? Certainly Boulez’s Mahler has been the revelation in the last generation or so of Mahler performance.) Performance, just as much as study of the score, reveals other possibilities – which may never now be taken up; or which may indeed some day by others, just as Boulez has responded to some of those by his predecesssors. Mallarmé, nevertheless, remains; or as Boulez might have put it, Mallarmé demeure. (Boulez’s analysis of the Rite of Spring, ‘Stravinsky demeure’, is surely as essential to a cellular reading as ever it was.) The transformation of verse into poetry is not the least important process at work here; who knows, were the material to continue to develop, might the ravishing vocal line disappear entirely? That is not to denigrate the excellent contribution of Yeree Suh to the performance. Perhaps less overtly sensual, even erotic, than Boulez’s 2011 Barbara Hannigan, Suh offered a straightforward integrity that was very much her own, and which sounded very much at ease with Fischer’s own approach. There will be further penetrations into the Boulezian labyrinth, into Mallarmé’s sirens, shipwrecks, lava, tombs, and all; in the meantime, this ‘classical’ performance did very well indeed. The dizzying yet now (relatively) stabilised interplay between different formal levels continues to challenge, to beguile, to point to an open future. Serialism demeure.