It’s hard in our current climate to imagine any other iconoclast of musical modernism being celebrated as energetically as Pierre Boulez is to mark his centenary year. But even amid fear and funding cuts, it remains impossible to imagine postwar classical music without him. There is, in theory, a Boulez for everyone: revelatory conductor, director of a major French research institute, rhetorical troublemaker – “blow up the opera houses,” he famously suggested – and, of course, composer of intricate, horizon-shifting scores.
Boulez’s own music was centre-stage for the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s latest total immersion day, the audience modest but passionate. (“To start, find 200 fanatics,” he once urged on the question of engaging people with new music.) The closing concert crackled abruptly into life, the first of his Deux Études – Musique Concrète for Tape griping and whirring from overhead speakers with the stage still empty. In the second, semi-recognisable pitches rush past in flurries, all attack and ending. More than 70 years since Boulez created them, such sounds remain refreshingly alien.
Pianist Tamara Stefanovich’s back-to-back performances of 12 Notations and Incises should be required listening for anyone still concerned about the “mathematical” qualities of Boulez’s music. Yes, she captured minute details, her tone utterly lucid. Her hands executed their own mesmerising ballet, while her pedalling was impossibly subtle. But it was the performance’s overwhelming musicality that made it unforgettable: Stefanovich’s absolute sense of line and direction, with melodic riffs clicking into a groove and complex textures gifted perspective.
The rest of the programme struggled to reach that high bar. Under Martyn Brabbins, BBC Singers were fearless (and armed with tuning forks) in Cummings ist der Dichter, but the orchestral texture lacked shape and drive. Pli Selon Pli – Boulez’s largest work – suffered similar problems. Soprano Anna Dennis provided a much-needed focal point and real communicative urgency, her upper register slicing laser-like through its instrumental surrounds. But too many of the orchestral passages felt like a battle with the barline: the challenges of simply keeping up, keeping together and getting the notes right left too little space for enchantment, never mind the momentum and musicality of the bigger picture.
