Tom Service on classical musicMusic This article is more than 15 years oldWhy Boulez is like a bait ball
This article is more than 15 years oldWhat a week at the South Bank in London: Monday and Tuesday brought the complete Schumann symphonies in visceral, illuminating performances from Simon Rattle and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, concerts that made me feel that Schumann is the most underrated symphonist of the 19th century: the slow movement of the Second Symphony looked back to Bach and Mozart and forward to Brahms, Bruckner and even Mahler. As if that wasn't enough, on Wednesday and Thursday there was a mini-residency from the Ensemble Intercontemporain and Pierre Boulez in two centenary concerts for Olivier Messiaen and Elliott Carter. It was the sort of lineup in four days that makes London's musical life seem like a year-long festival.
Most fascinating of all for me was the chance to hear two of Boulez's own recent works in the flesh: the clangourous Sur Incises for three harps, three pianos and three percussionists and Dérive 2 for 11 players. These are both huge pieces, playing for about 40 and 45 minutes, and they're both the results of Boulez's mania for endless revision and endless expansion. Sur Incises, which Boulez completed (for the moment at any rate) in 1998, has a glittering soundworld that morphs from percussive work-out to a soft-focused stasis on his favourite, radiant harmonies. There's a polish and a voluptuousness about this music that's instantly appealing and gripping for the whole experience of the piece. A packed Festival Hall gave Boulez a rock-star reception after the music's coda.
But Dérive 2 takes the ideas of Sur Incises to another level. I had the sense last night at the Queen Elizabeth Hall that although the piece was 45 minutes long, it could either have been 20 minutes or 200 and it wouldn't really have mattered. All of the music you hear in it is based on a single chord (derived – see what I've done there? – from a musical transliteration of the initials of Paul Sacher's name). Everything changes on the surface – there are passages where everything is speeding along vertiginously, which then contract into pools of slower music – but nothing changes underneath. It's a musical world that's completely hermetic and yet infinitely expandable. Weird.
Listening to it is like looking through a kaleidoscope for three-quarters of an hour. You'd better hope you like the kaleidoscope for a kick-off; but if you do, there's a seductive, hypnotic quality to the music that is a million miles from the aggressive iconoclasm of Boulez's earliest music. The journey from the piano version of Boulez's Notations or Second Piano Sonata to Dérive 2 is more than a chronological one of six decades or so – it's a huge stylistic shift, too.
There's also something definitively French about Dérive 2. It's as if Debussy were to take a single gesture from La Mer and magnify it until it filled 45 minutes. That's the seduction of Dérive 2, but also its limitation. Boulez cannot really express change or difference the way that Debussy can. And he can't do it like Elliott Carter, either, whose music made up the first half of last night's concert. Carter's music is also based on pre-determined harmonic fields, but he creates the illusion of dynamic and dramatic change in a piece like the Clarinet Concerto, brilliantly played by Alain Damiens. Boulez, on the other hand, doesn't do drama.
About half an hour into Dérive 2, it came to me what the music was making me feel like. Remember those bait balls of sardines and assorted small fish species in The Blue Planet? Those continually shape-shifting forms, always different but always the same, which need to be propelled by an incessant energy just to retain their form? That's Dérive 2 right there: listening to it is like being one of those fish surrounded by the swirl of sameness around you. Just like the fish, you're trapped by the music's centripetal focus on a single guiding harmony, which you can only escape when the music stops. And that's when the marlin come – but that's stretching the metaphor well past breaking point.
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