United Kingdom Boulez and Cage: Mark van de Wiel (clarinet), Sarah Nicolls (ready piano), London Sinfonietta / Thomas Kemp (conductor), Michael McCarthy (director), Francesca Amewudah-Rivers (actor). Purcell Room, London, 9.3.2025. (MB)
Cage – Six Melodies
Boulez – Improvisé—pour le Dr. Ok
Cage – Credo in US
Boulez – Dérive 1
Boulez – Domaines
Cage – Variations I
This London Sinfonietta live performance, ‘progressive’ in the most effective fairly than the debased, trivial means, framed performances of works by Pierre Boulez and John Cage with participating readings from their correspondence by Francesca Amewudah-Rivers and quick filmed contributions. It made for an enthralling and fulfilling night on the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room, exactly as a result of the extent of efficiency was so excessive, ‘additions’, although they have been excess of that, genuinely complementing fairly than substituting for musical excellence. It was a delight, furthermore, to see a sold-out venue, as soon as once more giving the mislead claims that nobody is concerned with listening to this music. Many people have a deep thirst for it; the one purpose we don’t go extra typically is a scarcity of alternatives to take action. Many don’t, simply as many don’t like all method of issues, whether or not Mozart, Beethoven, the Beatles, or the rest; there isn’t a purpose to be dishonest and substitute one’s personal preferences and pursuits for the voice of the world-spirit. And there’s each purpose to welcome an all-too-rare alternative to listen to, fairly than merely speak about, this music, particularly in so illuminating a juxtaposition, which supplied nice musical contrasts in addition to factors of mutual historic fascination.
The primary studying got here not from the correspondence as such, though it’s included within the Cambridge College Press Nattiez-Samuels version as its first merchandise. It was as an alternative taken from Boulez’s 1949 spoken introduction – each manuscript and a tough draft are a part of the Paul Sacher Stiftung – to the efficiency he helped organise of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for ready piano, given at Suzanne Tézanas’s Paris salon. A short filmed excerpt was juxtaposed with a reside excerpt from Boulez’s personal Second Piano Sonata of the earlier 12 months. Completely different worlds certainly, although the excerpted correspondence that adopted advised real curiosity in mutual exploration too, Boulez’s apology for typically writing in French – ‘my [English] grammar continues to be too shaky’ (3/11/12 January 1950) – typical of a humility for which he’s nonetheless too sometimes credited.
Cage’s Six Melodies for violin and keyboard (piano) from this similar 12 months got a pleasant efficiency by Clio Gould and Elizabeth Burley, the rhythmic development Boulez admired strongly, but removed from didactically, to the fore. Initially un-, even anti-‘violinistic’, the music appeared to develop each as music and as violin music, the third and fourth items particularly splendidly ‘fiddling’. It felt like a gateway to the meditative sensibility in addition to to the possibility operations that will more and more characterise Cage’s music within the years to observe. Boulez’s 2005 revision of his 1969 tribute for the eightieth birthday of Aldred A. Kalmus of Common Version, Improvisé—pour le Dr. Ok, opened with typical piano éclat. A really sturdy preliminary sense of Schoenberg – and he’s there someplace – pale barely once I realised: ‘in fact: like the opposite Kalmus items, this was written for the Pierrot ensemble’. Flute trills and their generative tendency appeared prophetic of later explorations, not least … explosante-fixe …, although its progress was very totally different. It was over in a flash, as ever leaving one wishing for extra.
A clip from the movie Works of Calder, additionally from 1950, adopted, together with Cage’s music: ‘the primary time I’ve felt the music to be essential to a movie’ (Boulez, 30 December 1950). Though Cage’s Credo in US was written earlier (1942) it appeared right here to pre-empt the composer’s rising curiosity in probability operations via its use of radio music. Rhythm and sounds of percussion have been actually infectious, main up, so it appeared, to these Sonatas and Interludes. Boulez’s Dérive 1 (1984) supplied extra distinction than complement, although was no much less welcome for that; it appeared to take up the baton from his earlier piece, the SACHER reference’s generative high quality seductively palpable. Febrile, ever-transforming, a feast of Messiaenic color, it spoke of and thru Debussy fairly than Cage’s Satie, and in its woodwind arabesques, equally proclaimed a Stravinskian inheritance completely internalised and remodeled.
Mark van de Wiel’s efficiency of the solo model of Domaines (1961-8) proved a surprising tour de drive. No matter Boulez’s intention, the aspect of alternative and mobility, the clarinettist deciding on the order by which the pages, every on a unique stand, are performed, brings an inescapable aspect of what quickly can be referred to as music theatre to proceedings, the performer’s one-man present prolonged to 2, counting his instrument. Aside from – although who might it’s other than? – van de Wiel’s equally excellent virtuosity and musical understanding, certainly one of Boulez’s triumphant reinstatements of the performer, what actually stood out was an nearly Wagnerian unendliche Melodie. One felt vividly in addition to merely heard the procedures at work in all parameters, assault included, within the longest of constructed strains.
Is Cage’s layering of transparencies in Variations I (1958) – to be carried out by any variety of performers on any devices and any quantity thereof – extra radical? Maybe. Much less ’Western’? Maybe. Much less ‘musical’? Maybe. Given the presentation, it’s hardly unreasonable to have felt led to ask such questions. Once more, although, it was the distinction introduced by one thing no much less triumphantly ‘itself’ that was actually the factor. It introduced with it a breath of the contemporary air many felt Cage had imparted to Darmstadt.
Mark Berry
