Nearly all the 500 seats in the glass-walled Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater at the Institute for Contemporary Art were filled last night for that unlikeliest of rare concert events: a full evening of music by Pierre Boulez. The concert “Fold by Fold” (a translation of Boulez’s Pli selon pli which wasn’t itself on the program), comprised an early work, Le marteau sans maître, and a late one, Dérive 2. Jeffrey Means conducted 15 members of Sound Icon, brought together by the Boston University Center for New Music (Joshua Fineberg, director).
The two works, each lasting about 45 minutes, could not be more different. Le marteau sans maître has been talked about, and even often performed, ever since 1959, when Robert Craft’s recording appeared; by now it’s considered a heady classic of post-Webern pointillism. Its nine movements, four of them with voice (on elusive French texts by René Char) and five for instruments alone in various combinations, require an ensemble adding up to alto flute, xylorimba, vibraphone, percussion, guitar, viola, and alto voice. (A short example from the second movement, “Commentaire I de ‘Bourreaux de solitude’ [Hangmen in the wilderness],” appears at right.) Jeff Means explained that Le marteau sans maître has evolved under the composer’s own direction since its first lightning-fast appearance, with Boulez’s later performances noticeably mellower in tempo, which last night’s performance followed, much to the advantage of ready perception of rapidly moving, even frantic sounds. Thus we were able to hear individual gestures in short bursts, usually separated by barlines marked with perceptible fermatas (“assez court,” etc.). Flute and percussion, including the mallet instruments, dominate the sound, with viola and guitar present but discreet. This music is engagingly brittle, and the ear must make an effort to absorb the quite thorough atonality, very like Webern’s, and we all remember that it comes from the post-World War II years of aggressive European post-Webern styles, with the voice both expressive and declamatory, not at all like the Sprechstimme of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, which otherwise seems like a direct inspiration for the complex solo-instrumental sound.
Boulez composed Dérive 2 in 1988 and revised it several times thereafter; we heard the final version of 2006. In a single movement with no pauses and hardly any slowdowns, it demands a great deal of constant total ensemble with some prominent solos, and very little pause for breath, and even less soft dynamics. And it has a distinct tonal coloration — “more voluptuous,” as Jeff Means remarked, with genuine harmony, even a generous scattering of paratonal triads, plus pedal points (there was a regularly recurring middle C, though I might have also heard a C sharp very like the one that Debussy used in le martyre de Saint-Sébastien and that Messiaen used in Turangalîla), noticeably recurring motives, and repeated segments, as well as bursts of chords in regular motion. I thought that if Le marteau is like Webern’s String Trio writ large, then Dérive 2 is like Berg’s Kammerkonzert with all three movements performed all at once, an explosive concatenation of wind and percussion sound, plus piano (and nearly inaudible harp), with a solo group of strings like a concerto grosso. I thought throughout that Boulez couldn’t have imagined this kind of total sound without years of orchestral conducting behind him, including an embrace in performance of composers whom in the 1950s he had affected to despise, like Tchaikovsky and Brahms. Maybe he actually derived something!
A fine roster of instrumentalists, some of whom I know through their local free-lance work, gave uniformly fine performances: Ashley Addington (flute in G); Elisabeth England (English horn); Rane Moore (clarinet); Jensen Ling (bassoon); Hazel Dean Davis (horn); Nick Tolle (xylophone, marimba); Mike Williams (vibraphone); Michael Weinfield-Zell (snare drum, bongos, cymbal, bell, triangle, gong, tamtam, maracas, claves, etc.); Pierre Bibault (guitar); Gabby Diaz (violin); Sam Kelder (viola); Stephen Marotto (cello); Angelina Savino (harp); and Yoko Hagino (piano); plus Rose Hegle, soprano (the score calls for an alto voice but the range is very wide). Jeff Means’s conducting kept it all together; his stickless techniqueseemd more than adequate, and from what I could tell, finely communicative. The audience appreciated all of this with complete concentration, rising and cheering.