The centenary of Pierre Boulez’s birth might well bring with it many performances of his works but perhaps none will be quite so breathtaking in the UK as this one given at the Barbican as part of a Boulez Total Immersion day given by the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
Pli selon pli (Fold upon fold) is the work that Boulez considered his masterpiece – it is also his largest, having gone through a number of revisions up to 2003 beyond its initial composition date of 1957–60. Composed in five movements, and based on poems by the nineteenth century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, Pli selon pli is a work of shimmering beauty, albeit one that can go to the extremes of violence and stasis to an almost symmetrical degree. Symmetrical, too, is the role of the soprano who delivers just a single line of verse in the first and last movements. Although the text of Mallarmé’s poems is submerged in Boulez’s work, it is invariably there for its sounds and rhythm – almost as if the words themselves are an added layer of music or texture. While Boulez plays with the sounds in the middle movements – the assonance, the rhymes – the meaning of the words is clearly important to him: these ‘improvisations’ are works of birth, of death (personal to the poet in Tombeau where he reflects on Paul Verlaine); the final word we hear is “death” as it comes crushing, slamming down with an orchestral crescendo of absolute finality, a wonderful symmetry to the opening crash – of astonishing power – which opens the work.
Arguably, the inner poems mutate into something sterile and cold: of stillbirth and death; of solitary sex behind a lace curtain and a trapped swan. The music seems to follow – a vast percussion section that chills the bone, five harps, marimbas and a celesta that creep with eery purity. The last movement grows like a violent chain reaction: it spirals and throws itself towards the inevitability and horror of death.
The performance was superlative. Anna Dennis, the soprano, had the measure of the work’s enormous complexity, a feeling for its textures. Sometimes an ‘echo’ was breathtaking before the word appeared; vowels that were short, or consonants that were soft were just superbly sung. There was a sense that Dennis was shadowing the orchestra, intertwining with it. Arguably, one might have wished for something slightly more profound in ‘Improvisation 3’ – but there was no question that Anna Dennis had the notes (a tuning fork helped), and that she brought out some of the subtle derivations on the rhythm in the verse. The playing of the BBC Symphony Orchestra was magnificent, especially from the enormous percussion section. Martyn Brabbins teased out some wonderful details: the guitar came through beautifully (I’ve rarely noticed it so clearly done before); the vibraphone and tubular bells were exquisite. Even features like the solo cello were highlighted in ways I have not encountered in a concert performance of this work.
Before the interval, the BBC Singers gave Cummings ist der Dichter, a work which evokes birdsong. This, too, was superbly done: that unusual, yet sensuous, sonority that takes advantage of the choir’s harmony; the melismas, the words that match the simplistic – yet oddly polished – lines of e.e cummings’s verse. The clarity from the BBC Singers was admirable: bell-like purity in the space between the consonants, and clear accents on the vowels.
Of the piano works I heard, the standout performance was from the afternoon recital – Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata. This explosive work – often compared to Beethoven’s Hammerklavier – is in many ways Boulez at his most radical: his most “destructive” in the first movement, “disintegrative” in the second, “repetitive” in the third and “razing” in the fourth. The sonata is one of the most relentless aural assaults of any piano piece and an element of ferocious anger serves many performances well. Tamara Stefanovich was the first-rate soloist: violent, spare, offering decaying details at the keyboard as she scorched and seared her way through the ruins of this astonishing work.
Marc Bridle
Pierre Boulez
Cummings ist der Dichter; Pli selon pli; Piano Sonata Nr.2
Anna Dennis (soprano); Tamara Stefanovich (piano); BBC Singers; BBC Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins
Milton Court Concert Hall/Barbican Centre, London, 30 March 2025
Top image: Anna Dennis and Martyn Brabbins
Photos: © Mark Allan