Aggregate age of conductor and composer? 186. No wonder that Elliott Carter called his new song-cycle What are Years. What indeed? The only disappointment was that the 101-year-old composer hadn’t made the trip from New York to hear the prolonged applause after the work’s Aldeburgh Festival premiere, conducted by his (not quite so) old friend, Pierre Boulez.
Carter has chosen five wry poems by Marianne Moore and set them with concision and subtlety. Indeed one song, To an Intra-Mural Rat (first line: “You make me think of many men”) is over in 15 frenetic seconds: an aptly breathless musical response to the scurrying rat and the poet’s reflection that some people can pass through your life and leave no trace.
I also loved the granite-like chords with which Carter buttressed the voice’s swooping line in Like a Bulwark. But the most poignant setting was of the poem What are Years itself — a hymn to the struggles that give humanity purpose and dignity, ending in the words: “This is mortality, this is eternity.” The voice swoops, then rises out of Carter’s typically busy orchestral texture, like an ennobling vision that transcends the petty snags of everyday life. This wide-stepping vocal line was put across with radiant assurance and tonal beauty by Claire Booth.
Around this premiere, Boulez’s Ensemble Intercontemporain delivered almost a potted history of the 20th-century avant-garde, from Varèse’s explosive, angular 1923 masterpiece Octandre and Ligeti’s swirling 1970 Chamber Concerto — with its terrifying, machine-like prestos and wild, Messiaen-like refrains — to Boulez’s own Derive 2, a vast single movement that ebbs and flows, races or lulls, with virtuosic inventiveness.
And what a band the Ensemble Intercontemporain is! The players look like a convention of deadly serious French civil servants — which they are, of course. Yet they play with huge elan. And Boulez, at 85, seems indefatigable.