In February, Ensemble Intercontemporain kicked off the South Bank Centre’s centenary celebration of Olivier Messiaen. Last night the Paris-based orchestra returned to close the season under its founder, Pierre Boulez, Messiaen’s brightest student and pre-eminent interpreter.

Boulez finds some of Messiaen’s music “banal” but not the two pieces on last night’s programme. Dating from the 1960s, they showcase Messiaen’s obsession with birdsong, for him an endless source of music.

Both Colours of the Celestial City and Seven Haikus place a solo pianist at the heart of a larger ensemble. In the first, clarinets, brass and percussion provide starkly contrasting textures. In the second, with the festival’s artistic director Pierre-Laurent Aimard as solo pianist, a small string section softens the contours. Yet the sound of birds permeates every moment, evoked in the piano’s restless tinkling, in the warm twittering of woodwinds, in the agitated murmurs and poundings of the percussion.

At times the wind section had phrases that unwittingly echoed jazz, while in one passage in Seven Haikus, the strings produced an uncanny imitation of a Japanese mouth organ. Such juxtapositions often come across as glaring anomalies; under Boulez’s calm, clear direction, everything made perfect sense.

It might seem odd to finish the Messiaen celebrations with a work not by him but if anyone has the right, it is Boulez. His Sur Incises is written for three pianists, three harpists and three percussionists (one playing oil cans). From this unwieldy combination Boulez conjures a magical web of sound. The piece begins slowly but quickly gathers momentum, repeatedly building to a pounding Boulez-boogie, then opening out to a clearing of musical calm. Sometimes textures were so carefully blended that it became impossible to tell which instrument was making which sounds.

This was Boulez at his most aurally seductive. Tonight he’s back on the South Bank, celebrating another centenary, the remarkable Elliott Carter. No doubt Boulez, 83 years old, finds it rejuvenating to conduct music by composers older than he is.
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