Pierre Boulez’s 90th birthday has been celebrated across the musical world, and the Proms have not slighted him. Seven of his works are down for the season, including one of the rarest, Figures-Doubles-Prismes, first performed in 1958, but developed with typical obsessiveness for a decade. It had its Proms premiere from the BBC Symphony Orchestra under François-Xavier Roth at the head of a programme allying it to the music of Ravel. As a composer epitomising Frenchness, albeit in headily intellectual mode, Boulez can perfectly well be placed in this context, and the connection was reinforced by the concert’s second item: Boulez’s dazzling orchestration of a two-minute, static, multilayered piano oddity by Ravel, his Frontispice of 1918.
Figures-Doubles-Prismes, a 22-minute span, is a sort of unadmitted set of orchestral variations, where variation is an unceasing, undelimited process: a proliferation of material (no independent segments) such as Boulez has always cleaved to as an ideal of form. The players are reseated in three groups across which ideas freely travel. The idiom lies between the abstruse pointillism of the 1950s and something more amenably articulated, but still pretty abstract; and the effect was of bewildering but fascinating complexity. Listening repeatedly to the performance on BBC iPlayer, I found the fascination increasing, but a clear sense of proceedings still elusive. It takes genius, of course, in any art form, to devise a work that draws you ever into a fresh encounter and makes you feel you can’t come to the end of it.
Already this season, we have heard Boulez’s Dérive 2 — a startlingly unbroken 45-minute stretch, and perhaps his most rigorous exercise in “proliferation” — along with arrangements of some of his early Notations piano miniatures. The Birmingham Contemporary Music Group under Franck Ollu, at Cadogan Hall, rose brilliantly to the challenge of Dérive 2, and gave the British premiere of Johannes Schöllhorn’s bright instrumentation of three of the 12 12-tone, 12-bar piano pieces. Susanna Mallki conducted the BBCSO in Boulez’s own spectacular orchestral expansions of five of them; as faithful transcriptions and prodigious proliferations, they equally cast their spell. Schöllhorn even compiled an ersatz Notation by taking a bar from each of his transcriptions and pasting them in sequence. It was surprisingly effective.
Arresting arrangements of French music, premieres both, figured in the BBC Philharmonic’s Prom under Nicholas Collon. Colin Matthews’s orchestration of Oiseaux tristes, from Ravel’s piano suite Miroirs, was ravishingly deft, and went logically with Christopher Dingle’s realisation of the unscored Un Oiseau des arbres de Vie movement that Messiaen omitted from his last completed work, the large-orchestral cycle Éclairs sur l’au-delà. This four-minute extravaganza calls for no fewer than 11 percussionists, who dominate the argument: a series of remorseless batterings interspersed with jolly chirpings.
His giant Turangalîla Symphony, its percussion merely 10 strong, had a tremendous performance from the same orchestra under Juanjo Mena — Steven Osborne totally authoritative in the piano obbligato, Valérie Hartmann-Claverie seeming to play the ondes Martenot one from memory. In the percussion department’s autonomous cycles of tickings, tappings and maraca shakings, a world of mathematics resides — this, like the nine-part cyclic structure of the work, must have been a profound if unacknowledged influence on Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître. But Messiaen unites his cerebral calculation with a ridiculous dithyrambic excess of joyous sensuality.
Advertisement
An exhilarated word for the Proms Sibelius symphony cycle, undertaken over a weekend by two orchestras and three conductors. Thomas Dausgaard had a quite Carlos Kleiber-like magnificence cajoling the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra into unforgettable, deep accounts of Nos 1 and 2. Ilan Volkov’s realisation, with the same players, of No 4 was hardly less commanding and penetrating; and their unveiling of Michael Finnissy’s specially commissioned Janne, taking Sibelius’s childhood name for a title, offered a portrait of the composer in a web of subtle reminiscences, none of them actual quotes. It was the most immediately striking, tonally direct, sheerly beautiful Finnissy piece I’ve heard.