Celebrating Pierre Boulez
GIUSEPPE PENNISI
continues his reports
from the Salzburg Summer Festival
An important part
of this year's Salzburg Summer Festival is
the celebration of the ninetieth birthday of Pierre Boulez, one of the most important contemporary composers and conductors, as well as the creator of IRCAM, the French institution
for musical research, especially in electronic composing and
playing. IRCAM has, no doubt, surpassedDarmstadt as
the major European center
of musical innovation.
Nine concerts are
devoted to Boulez throughout
the Festival. I was in theaudience for
two of them, and a third (on 8 August 2015) was a repeat of the concert I
listened to in Ravenna on
7 June (An Imperial Festival, 11
June, 2015): in the main concert hall of
the Mozarteum, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich offered a three
hour marathon of Boulez's entire piano music, from the Douze Notations and the first twoSonatas of
the nineteen forties to Une page d'éphéméride and Structuresfrom the first
few years of the twenty-first century. It was an engrossing and tantalizing experience.
On 30 July 2015, in the very special Felsenreitschule,
the Vienna ORFRadio Symphonieorchester, conducted by
Cornelius Meister, played Boulez's Rituel in memoriam di Bruno Maderna pour orchestra en huit groupes, the first of the series. The young conductor (aged
thirty-five) handled the very complex score very
well from memory: his lectern, spectacularly set on a platform in the middle of the
orchestra seats, was empty. The Rituel is a fifty minute funeral march based
on a seven notemelody, introduced by the group of oboes and then repeated, withvariations, by the other seven groups. Four of the eight groups are on the stage.
The other four are on special platforms or balconies set in the
Felsenreitschule so as to create a stereophonic effect. In line with
the Festival's emphasis on
differences and inequalities, the meaning is
that these differences and inequalities terminate with the end of the humanadventure for each of us. This is quite in tune with the second part of
the concert: Mahler's first symphony, which in one of the movements recalls the death of
a woodcutter. The audience was enthusiastic for
both Ritueland Mahler's first symphony.
 Cornelius Meister and the ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien at the 2015 Salzburg Summer Festival. Photo © 2015 Marco Borrelli. Click on the image for higher resolution |
The basic theme of the Festival was also the core of
the 31 July 2015 concert in the Kollegienkirche, the Salzburg University Church. Sylvain Cambreling conducted Klangforum Wien in a sample of
contemporary andtwentieth century French
music: Couleurs de la Cité Céleste by Olivier Messiaen, Jour, Contre Jour by Gérard Grisey (the creator of
'spectral music'), Vereichnete Spur ('A precarious road') by Matthias
Pintscher, andexplosante-fixe by Pierre Boulez. All these works had
been premiered between 1963 and 2005. It is interesting to
note that both Grisey and Boulez studied with Messiaen. Pintscher, the evening's only non Frenchcomposer, was a pupil of Grisey and Boulez. Thus, the concert provided a good
overview of French contemporary music. However, there were two shortcomings: the Kollegienkirche does not
have a very good acoustic, and the program was
excessively long. The Kollegienkirche was very full at the beginning of
the evening (with quite a few youngsters) but two and a half hours later (with
only short intermissions) a few rows at the back of the church (where the
acoustic is less satisfactory) were empty.
 Sylvain Cambreling conducting Klangforum Wien at the 2015 Salzburg Summer Festival. Photo © 2015 Marco Borrelli. Click on the image for higher resolution |
The duration (three hours) was also a problem of the 1
August 2015 concert by world famous pianist Grigory
Sokolov, in the Grosses Festpielhaus, an auditorium and opera house seating
an audience of some three thousand. The program included Bach's Partita No 1, BWV 825, Beethoven's Piano Sonata No
7, and two Schubert works:
the Piano Sonata, Op Posth 143, D 784, and Sechs Moments musicaux, Op 94, D 780. Sokolov received acclamation and requests for encores.
Thus, he added seven encores from his repertory. As a result, the concert (which started at 9pm — quite late in Austria) ended well after midnight. Some of the enthusiastic audience had
meanwhile disappeared.
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