At a talk about Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) at the Barbican last Sunday, one of the speakers dared suggest that the BBC is no longer the cultural beacon it was in the French composer-conductor’s lifetime. The exhalation of oufs and pffs from the audience – reminiscent of one of those short, avant-garde pieces consisting only of outbursts of breath that Boulez himself might have written – was indicative: part you’re stating the obvious, part how can you say the unsayable in a discussion being broadcast on BBC Radio 3. After some hasty throat clearing, the matter was clarified: other platforms now exist, from YouTube to Spotify to TikTok to all the rest. We are our own curators. The very next day, tacitly acknowledging its changed status, the BBC admitted it faced an unprecedented financial challenge, with an annual income drop of £1bn compared with 15 years ago. Its chair, Samir Shah, said (among other things) that the BBC still had a vital role as “the place where people come together for unforgettable shared moments”.
Later this month, the new season of Proms, the biggest coming together for classical music, will be announced. The BBC orchestras and BBC Singers, endangered for as long as anyone can remember, will play a central part. However sceptical we may be about aspects of Radio 3, or its new sibling, Classical Unwind – designed to awaken the senses and simultaneously relax you into sleep – their very presence is still remarkable. This thought pressed constantly, and urgently, at Total Immersion: Pierre Boulez, an all-day BBC Symphony Orchestra tribute to the brilliant and paradoxical maverick who, in his time as the ensemble’s chief conductor (1971-74), shook up concert life – including the Proms, with his Roundhouse series.
Always radical, he celebrated intellectual rigour and scorned anything out of line with his thinking: famously, at one time, opera houses he wanted to burn down and Tchaikovsky, whose music he claimed to hate. As a conductor, his quest was for transparency and precision, and an avoidance of any emotion that did not grow directly from the music. His own works, glittering and complex yet more sensuous than he himself might have realised, came only after long struggles and endless revisions.
The BBC SO day, which included the pianist Tamara Stefanovich’s crystalline accounts of 12 Notations (1945) and Incises (1994, revised 2001), culminated in Pli selon pli, a 70-minute epic that, with Le Marteau sans maître, is Boulez’s acknowledged masterpiece. Here it was conducted by Martyn Brabbins and performed with consummate skill by all. The title translates as Fold Upon Fold, from a poem by Boulez’s favourite poet, Mallarmé, in which mist recedes to reveal the city of Bruges.
Boulez revised it six times between 1957 and 2003. It requires us to rethink what an orchestra is, making it expensive to perform: instead of the usual forces, each instrument is, in effect, hand-picked. A soprano soloist – here the pure-toned Anna Dennis – sings brief texts, scaling an ensemble that jangles and shimmers with multiple harps, guitar, mandolin, celesta, tubular bells and 30 types of percussion. “That was fantastic, but when will it ever happen again?” someone asked me, noticing my programme as I got off the tube. I have no idea. It felt like stepping back in history, to a period of stern but invigorating musical cubism that liberated younger generations, among them the British composers Harrison Birtwistle and George Benjamin. Who will now take the Boulez legacy forward is an unanswered question.
One of his passions was Mahler, especially the later symphonies. Through concerts and recordings he was a pioneer in sparking the modern reappraisal. Boulez’s particular interest was in Mahler’s expansion of symphonic form – a bit of an understatement as a phrase, since none of the nine (complete) is short, and the Third is reckoned the longest in standard repertory, lasting up to 110 minutes. Given that it self-confessedly embraces all the world, it could be deemed a bit brief. No watch-checking was required in the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s heartfelt performance in the Philharmonic Hall, under the baton of their charismatic chief conductor, Domingo Hindoyan.
The occasion, with the sopranos and altos of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir and the Liverpool Philharmonic Youth Choir, had heightened emotion, since it marked the retirement, after 16 years as chief executive, of one of the most admired orchestral administrators around, Michael Eakin. Tempos tended towards the broad, but atmosphere and detail shone out, ebbing and flowing through the six movements, from rustic dance to Nietzschean nocturne. The soloist Jennifer Johnston, herself a Liverpudlian, is the mezzo-soprano of choice for the glowing intensity of O Mensch. The big trombone solo, menacing, low and insistent in the huge opening movement, was impeccably played. So too was the offstage post horn, calling as if from a distant Austro-Bohemian peak.
From massed orchestra and chorus to one singer and one pianist is less of leap than might appear: Schubert, admired (mostly) by his fellow Austrian Mahler, also explored long form, in his late piano sonatas, and especially in the song cycle Winterreise. Joyce DiDonato recorded it with the conductor-pianist Yannick Nézet-Séguin in 2021. At Wigmore Hall she sang it – twice in one evening – with another regular collaborator, conductor and keyboard virtuoso Maxim Emelyanychev, here playing a fortepiano.
This earlier instrument transfigured the piano part, now more clipped, alert, imperative. DiDonato has, lightly and unobtrusively, with use of a small desk and book, suggested a historical setting for these 24 songs of loss and love, written for male voice. The shifts in feeling, as well as the deepening and whitening of vocal colour, could have a column to themselves. As only she could – whoever utters anything after Winterreise? – the “Yankee Diva” spoke a few words and gave us an encore: Richard Strauss’s Morgen! Nothing to add to that.
Star ratings (out of five)
Pierre Boulez ★★★★
Mahler Symphony No 3 ★★★★★
Joyce DiDonato and Maxim Emelyanychev ★★★★
