The LSO's three B's: Boulez, Benjamin, Brahms

Pierre Boulez - Éclat

George Benjamin – Interludes and Aria from ‘Lessons in Love and Violence’ (World Premiere)

Brahms – Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98

Boulez 100, Rattle 70: both nice and buzzy, both true for this season. The two collided in this concert, and how: Boulez’ Éclat (note, not Éclat-Multiples) ,with Sir Simon at the helm in his role, now, as LSO Conductor Emeritus (there will be two birthday concerts in January). 

Atle is no stranger to Boulez’ Éclat for 15 players (1964/5). He conducted it at the Proms in 2016, with the Berliner Philharmoniker, where it prefaced Mahler’s most “modern” symphony, his Seventh: the instrumental line-up there included Majella Stockhausn (Karlheinz’s daughter). But let that not give the impression the walls are covered with Boulez, as perhaps they should be: live performances remain rare events.  Here's that Proms performance:

Èclat was written in celebration of both the opening of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Boulez’s own 40th birthday; its source material actually lies in an earlier (disowned) piano piece Don. The scoring is solo piano and two instrumental groups, one of eight plucked/struck instruments, the other six sustaining instruments. The full instrumentarium is piano, celesta, harp, glockenspiel, vibraphone, mandolin, guitar, cimbalom, tubular bells, alto flute, cor anglais, trumpet, trombone, viola, and cello. Éclat itself launched a chain of composition, expanding to Éclat/Multiples (which remains unfinished). The score includes an element of chance: although the parts are notated, but the conductor decides which order the events are heard in. 

The stage set-out at the Barbican seemed to deliberately set our space between the players on an individual as well as group level (so that when mandolin and harp ‘react’ to one another, they do so at some distance, which seems to underline the timbral difference). The overall sound is glittering. The word “Éclat”: itself has a number of meanings (splinter, fragment, explosion, reflection of light). Boulez himself was fascinated by sonority itself, and that comes across strongly in his own performances (whether the preternatural virtuosity of his own Ensemble Intecontemporain or the live performance captured in 1967 with members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory which seems to have more of a sense of discovery about it – unsurprisingly, given the proximity of recording date to composition!).  

Rattle found a sense of re-discovery in the Barbican performance, the juxtaposition of opening piano cadenza (Elizabeth Burley) and sustained wind (beautifully balanced) setting out the juxtapositional stall for the work as a whole. What set this performance apart, from both Boulez recordings referenced and indeed Rattle’s BPO Proms account, was a sense of playfulness. Play in a Modernist setting,  of course, but lightness nevertheless. There was drama, too, in the tremolo cimbalom and glockenspiel, and overall a phenomenal sense of detail, carefully realised. Boulez’ score offers up myriad timbal exchanges and confluences between instruments; the result is kaleidoscopic. 

The Proms performance is available via YouTube here. 

A World Premiere next: Interludes and Aria (from Lessons in Love and Violence), a montage of excepts from George Benjamin’s opera. The opera split the critics somewhat, and perhaps its London performances were ill-timed, coming so close to another opera on the subject of Kind Edward II, Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini’s Edward II, performed at the Deutsche Oper Berlin.  

The structure of the new piece is that selected excerpts surrounding Isabel’s aria from the second scene (‘Bring me a cup of vinegar ...’). The singer *Barbara Hannigan, who participated in the premiere) enters during the performance, allowing us to hear Benjamin’s music in purely orchestral garb first.  

The text is by Martin Crimp, who, like Benjamin, was present at the Barbican Hall. Hannigan’s performance was faultless. The aria is effectively a hymn to music, despite the action of acid (vinegar) on items of ostensible ‘value’. As the text says, ‘The beauty of the pearl – like the slow radiance of music – is what the pearl is’. She earlier tells the surrounded company (silent here, obviously) ‘... do not come here / trying to put a price on music’. The vocal line is cruel but it is also just the sort of repertoire Hannigan eats for breakfast. She is dramatic while ensuring diction is clear, sometimes to the fault of over-emphasis. But her lyrical breadth is beyond question; Hannigan was instantly immersed in the role. Here she is, from the Royal Opera performances (this is shorn of the memorable first line, 'Bring me a cup of vinegar ...'):

You can also hear Isabel's aria, with Hannigan singing and intact, here:

Finally, something of a shift: Brahms. And yet, maybe not such a change: Brahms’ thematic workings can be as complex and subtle as any modern masters, his rhythmic intricacies just as impressive. It is good to hear Rattle in Brahms: if only the Barbican acoustic were kinder to the LSO strings up high. While Rattle does not evoke a Karajan cushion in the name of Brahmsian warmth, the music does need something of a glow. What characterises Rattle’s Brahms is his attention to detail, resulting in Brahms’ processes emerging anew. This was a reading more convincing than Sir Simon’s Berlin performance (live, but from multiple performances in Berlin in October-November 2008 and currently part of the Warner box, The Berlin Years), and yet not as convincing as the last performance I heard, the Philharmonia Orchestra in Teatro Petruzzelli, Bari, Italy in late November last year, under Alessandro Crudele. Rattle finds drama, detail and moments of revelation (the juxtaposition of scorings in the third movement, like so many organ stops, for example). But it does not congeal into a symphonic whole. In just the way the second movement was a Brahms tone poem, so it was an isolated brick in a wall, a self-contained statement. The first movement only really caught on fire towards the end; that third movement boasted appropriately punchy accents, but some string detail got lost. The finale, the great Passacaglia, was certainly packed with incident, but because it all emerged somewhat piecemeal, it left this listener, at least, curiously unsatisfied. 

There was no doubting the excellence of some of the playing, including the trombones in the finale, the wind balance in the slow movement, and some superb bassoon contributions from Rachel Gough. But Brahms is so much more than a sequence of lovelinesses. 

Click here for a link to the complete Brahms Symphonies conducted by Rattle in that Berlin box.

Click here for a link to purchase the Rattle box from Amazon.