Barbican, London
World premieres by Olga Neuwirth, Rafael Marina Arcaro and Lara Agar celebrated Pierre Boulez’s centenary, with Maxime Pascal a hyper-expressive conductor
The second of the London Symphony Orchestra’s centenary tributes to Pierre Boulez was conducted by Maxime Pascal. As in the previous instalment, Boulez’s own music – the five orchestral Notations, Nos 1 to 4 and 7, that were completed at the time of his death – made up only a small part of the programme. Yet just as his influence as both composer and conductor pervaded so much of late 20th-century music, so it could be felt through all of Pascal’s programme, in which the three panels of Debussy’s Images – a work that Boulez himself conducted with peerless objectivity and exquisite feeling for its dazzling orchestral palette – were interleaved with three world premieres.
The first and shortest of those new works, commissioned by the LSO, was also the most effective. Olga Neuwirth’s Tombeau II: Hommage à Pierre Boulez, takes as its starting point one of the early piano Notations that Boulez did not orchestrate (the eighth), and turns it into a slow, menacing chorale clouded with microtones and decorated with harmonics and glissandos, which builds remorselessly to an abrupt climax.
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