Boulez Répons

 Day 10

Boulez Répons

Ensemble Intercontemporain

Pierre Boulez

This year marks the centenary of the birth of Pierre Boulez. Even as I write that I find it impossible to believe. In my mind he is still the leader of the avant garde but of course that betrays my own age. It is rather like somebody just before the start of the First World War regarding Wagner as the last word in modern music.

Boulez was certainly an important figure when I was at university.  We would have certainly heard some of music - probably Le Marteau sans maitre and the piano sonatas. I also read - or at least try to read - some of the very impenetrable writings by the composer and even more the writing of analysts about his work. Since then I haven't actively listened to much Boulez but I continued to be aware of his music through fairly regular BBC television programmes where there was serious attention to his music - those were the days. I heard him conduct live once, when he came to Nottingham with a programme of Webern, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. What stood out for me in that concert was the way that he made the Webern Cantatas sing - a far cry from the early recordings I heard where , understandably, the singers struggled to do anything more than get approximately to the right notes. 

I had I think seen an extract from Repons in a television documentary but I had never heard the whole thing. It has the reputation of being perhaps the most successful piece ever written to combine live instruments with electronics. It really should be heard in the round, but on headphones it was still remarkably effective.  What a fantastic piece it is!  I'd expected that the colours would be extraordinary, as indeed they were. Boulez had a wonderful ear and the sonorities he conjured up, both from the live instruments and the electronics were a constant pleasure. What I wasn't prepared for was the sheer rhythmic vitality. My student memories of Boulez were that the music wandered about a bit aimlessly without out much sense of pulse. This was not the case here at all and there were genuinely exciting moments of rhythmic momentum. 

With the benefit of hindsight you can now see Boulez not as a destroyer of tradition but somebody who was part of that tradition. You hear echoes of Debussy and Ravel in the wind textures and the rhythms clearly would not have been possible without Stravinsky. But those influences, and many others, are all absorbed into a wholly personal style. I certainly think that anybody open minded who is prepared to give it a go will find a huge amount to enjoy in this music.

I can't leave without discussing the end - where the electronically supported instruments play out a long and very evocative coda. I was reminded of the chorale-type codas in some of Stravinsky's work - particularly the Requiem Canticles. Very different in sound of course but the kinship is clearly there.