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London,
Barry Millington's rating
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Description: Pierre Boulez conducts Schoenberg's Die Gluckliche Hand, the UK premiere of Matthias Pintscher's Osiris and Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle. With mezzo-soprano Michelle De Young, bass Peter Fried and the BBC Singers.
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Ambitious: Boulez conducted a remarkable show
Who would have thought one of Boulez’s Notations would serve as an encore? But the second of this long-running series, imbued with the dynamism and rhythmic complexity of the Rite of Spring, made for an exhilarating envoi.
In fact it didn’t go quite as well the second time but it scarcely mattered. Boulez thoroughly deserved the ovation he got for navigating the LSO through an astonishingly bold exploration of 20th-century modernism.
First in chronological terms came Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces: a direct challenge to the tonal system, to be sure, yet music also firmly rooted in the past, as Boulez’s eloquent reading clearly showed. Not only are the harmonic progressions anchored in a late Romantic soundworld but the expressionist sensibility is one that speaks to us as directly as ever.
The fragile beauty of Stravinsky’s contemporaneous Chant du Rossignol (Song of the Nightingale) was realised admirably, too, by the players of the LSO, responding so well to Boulez’s unflappable direction.
The concert began with Bartok’s Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion, the less often heard orchestral version of a work that perhaps achieves a tighter focus when performed by just four players. But there was no lack of precision in this rendering by pianists Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich with Neil Percy and Nigel Thomas on percussion.
Last came the Notations, originally a set of 12 small piano pieces, though Boulez has been tinkering with them for some six decades now, gradually expanding and transforming them into large-scale orchestral structures.
We heard the five he has completed (Nos I-IV and No VII), each a miraculous sonic canvas charged with richly detailed, brilliantly conceived musical invention. The conducting scores themselves are enormous: an appropriate metaphor for the ambitious scale and imaginative sweep of these remarkable pieces.
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