Music
Pillar of the establishment
Robin Holloway
Suddenly the contemporary music scene in London is more active than for many years. A new boost in funding, a new breath of confidence, a resurgence of vitali- ty irrespective of general decline? The rosy flush of health or the hectic flush of fever- ish desperation? Whichever, whatever, it is welcome.
Its major element can only be occasional, centred as it is on the 75th birthday of Pierre Boulez. Nearly half a century ago Adorn° already lamented that the new music was growing old: yet it is a shock to realise that the erstwhile cutting-edge of the next wave of avant-garde has itself passed well beyond middle age. For Boulez himself is so ubiquitous, energetic, unchanging.
All three adjectives apply to the ambi- tious tour he undertakes currently with the LSO — 33 concerts in some 12 cities, pre- senting a characteristically didactic reperto- ry — seminal masterworks of early to high modernism, music of his own generation, and four new commissions exemplifying the 'Ignore Brian. He's in a mood 'cause the doc- tor's told him he's got only six months to live.' continuing validity of this particular view of history. With commendable self-effacement he is present as composer only modestly. But he'll loom overwhelmingly at a Pierre- Power weekend towards the end of March with four concerts on the South Bank devoted (for the most part) to his output from earliest days (the notations and first sonata for piano) to some of the most recent, culminating in ph scion phi, the whole-evening homage to Mallarme which stands still at the centre of his oeuvre.
So ubiquity and energy for sure. But unchanging? Several recent radio inter- views have raised the eyebrows a millime- tre. Boulez's impregnable lucidity and urbanity continue to conceal the fiery radi- cal who once notoriously advocated violent destruction to all opera houses. But he has long been a pillar of the establishment, pre- siding over an institutionalised modernism as if it were a multi-national business cor- poration. Within the blandness needed for such a position the iconoclasm persists, an atrophied appendix from a long-relin- quished primal state. The stance remains intact — obligatory progress, no glances backwards or even sideways, complexity avant route chose, no concessions — and at its heart an unaltered mission-statement: 'MS' goals are exactly the same — discovery of self.' Yet that self has changed almost out of recognition even while returning full circle to contemplate its original materials down perspectives of accumulated experi- ence and expertise. The paradox is shown most glaringly in the glamorous destiny of the juvenile notations already mentioned — dry little compositional exercises have been progressively enhanced, encrusted with lav- ish jewels and twiddly gilding for huge orchestral forces managed with the most hair-splitting sensory refinement imagin- able. The general tendency, in all his out- put, from gaunt essentiality to teeming redundancy, effects a major volte-face within the apparently immovable.
Two of the `3rd generation' commissions have been heard in London (Barbican) so far — Olga Neuwirth's ClinamenINodus and George Benjamin's Palimpsest. Both show the continuing strengths and weak- nesses of an aesthetic that, like the maitre's, emphasises sonority over sub- stance. One is inevitably reminded of COzanne's exclamation over Monet — 'only an eye: but what an eye. ClinamenfiVodus (the first means 'swerve, deviation, moment of unforeseeable catastrophe', the second, 'knot, nodal point, nub, nucleus') comes as a dazzling carpet of sound — zithers plucked, bowed, electronically prolonged, soughing sirens, rumbling drums, harmon- ics and slides, effects of aeolian harp and bells — losing energy all the way, sinking into extinction, a crumbling wall decaying before your very eyes and ears. Palimpsest Ca manuscript on which two or more texts have been written successively, the first sur- viving only in fragments') sounded less con- summate only because so clearly unconsummated; the composer had been first stuck, then freed with a last-minute rush, producing a fragment that cries out for continuation. What's vouchsafed so far is as different from Neuwirth as could be within the same general area — severe not luxuriant, with harmonium-like writing, beautifully voiced, for massed woodwinds, 'overwritten' by two superimposed texts, splintery ejaculations on brass, drums, piano, then a halo of solo strings. The har- monium chorale broadens out into an organ-like massif centrale, surprisingly tri- adic: a long pause; a few soft plink-plonks; delicate wisps of melody; and the rest is silence. More, please!
One notable change in Boulez's pantheon emerged from an interview by sheer omis- sion. Defining his own generation, the New of the Fifties who are now old, he referred to 'myself, Stockhausen and Berio' — a silent rewrite of history to anyone who can remember the ritual 'holy trinity' of the postwar avant-garde whose Italian member was the late Luigi Nono. He is omitted also from an enterprising triptych of composer- portrait concerts (BBC SO at the Festival Hall) which add lustre and context to this revivified season. Berio has already come and gone, himself conducting a new saxo- phone concertante, sitting back for one of the (grossly overrated) series of sequenze for virtuoso solo instruments (at this con- cert, the bassoon) then resuming the baton for the heroic Coro, a generous cornucopia setting miscellaneous art and folk texts from many cultures, a sort of global les noces. Henze too has come and gone (a composer so incompatible with Boulez as not even to require Soviet whitewashing). And Stockhausen is still to come. Is Nono out of mind and hearing only because he is dead? Perhaps this composer, unlike the others, remains too rebarbative — still so radical in his earlier rawness, his political stridency, his later reaction to the other extreme of gentle slow-motion meditation — to be easily assimilated into the OK club.
Previous page
