This concert by the London Symphony Orchestra had the appearance of a dual celebratory function, marking as it did both the centenary of Pierre Boulez, one of the towering figures of music in the last century, and the 70th birthday of the evening’s conductor, Simon Rattle.
If Rattle’s programme choices made it a decidedly muted affair, are we to draw the conclusion he doesn’t find reaching the biblical threescore years and ten milestone a cause for merriment?
Boulez may be notorious for applying dodecaphonic principles rigorously to dynamics, duration and timbre as well as pitch. Yet in Éclat (1965) he paradoxically introduced an element of chance by giving the players floating random passages in which the conductor chooses from among the options offered.
The latter becomes the curator of the piece, not merely the interpreter – or as Boulez himself put it, like a concerto soloist interacting with his instrumental ensemble.
With its characteristic delicacy of scoring – the 15 instruments include celesta, harp, glockenspiel, vibraphone and cimbalom, for example – the most immediately appealing aspect of Éclat, as often with Boulez, is the sheer beauty of its sound. That rarefied quality was enhanced by Rattle, drawing an alert, spontaneous response as he pointed at each player in turn.
(Mark Allan)
George Benjamin’s opera Lessons in Love and Violence, to a text by Martin Crimp, is even less plausibly party fare. The mood of the grimly brutal tale of Edward II’s downfall was caught chillingly by Barbara Hannigan as the slighted Queen Isabel, when she emerged from the back of the orchestra to declaim “Bring me a cup of vinegar”.
For a moment you expect her to drink it, but her purpose is to drop into it a priceless pearl, flaunting her wealth in the face of her impoverished subjects. She’s not a woman you greatly warm to and Hannigan brought the declamation of her aria to a feral climax. Whatever one’s misgivings about the story, Benjamin’s score combines the ravishing and the visceral in a way that only he can.
A Brahms symphony after the interval might have suggested something to raise the spirits. And so it did, even if it was the most solemn of Brahms’s four. Rattle can always be relied upon to show us the familiar in a new light and here, perhaps taking his cue from Boulez, he did it largely through sonority.
While the harmonies remained sombre, the texture in which they were clothed was deep-pile velvet. Also notable – again recalling the Boulez – was the spontaneity with which these supremely accomplished players responded to Rattle’s flexibly paced unfolding of the music.
Particularly effective was the prolonged upbeat that opens the work, like an anguished inhalation. Something similar was heard a couple of times in the Andante, too, imbuing its lyricism with a tragic intensity. That was the mood of the finale also, powerfully and urgently delivered.
All in all, then, not the pyrotechnic display one might have expected to celebrate a double birthday – even the Brahms Hungarian Dance chosen as encore was a sparkler rather than a firecracker. But with music-making of this calibre, who’s complaining?