Boulez at 90: LSO and Peter Eötvös

On the 26^th of March 2015, Pierre Boulez turns 90. To celebrate, the Barbican Centre has programmed a day of total immersion and two landmark concerts, which revolve around the serialist composer’s oeuvre and some of his favourite music. On the 23^rd of April, the London Symphony Orchestra will take to their resident hall to perform two pieces by Boulez and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Peter Eötvös, former director of Ensemble InterContemporain and the foremost interpreter of Boulez’s works, will conduct. For followers of the post-war avant-garde, this is essential; for those eager to dip their feet in the waters of contemporary music, it will serve as the perfect introduction.
Few twentieth-century compositions can claim to be as popular as The Rite of Spring (1913). Written for Sergei Diaghilev’s groundbreaking Ballet Russes, its first performance famously caused a riot. Boulez’s own interpretation of the piece, recorded in 1969, is generally considered amongst the very best. Stravinsky’s orchestration is vivid, with an unprecedented percussive force that overflows with the energy of ecstatic motion. Alternatively depicting a beauteous scene of revitalised nature and startling pagan rituals, its final movement – in which a chosen girl must dance to death – is amongst the most terrifying in all music.
The Rite is sandwiched between Boulez’s Livre pour cordes (1968) and Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna (1974-5). The first is both an orchestration and a reimagining of an earlier string quartet. Shimmering fragments move about in what can seem like complete chaos, never settling into stasis; the overall effect is of mystical, ghostly beauty. Rituel, composed in tribute to fellow composer Maderna, calls for eight separate groups of musicians to be scattered around the hall. Each plays around a percussionist playing at a different tempo, giving the piece a complex rhythmic structure. The same musical ideas are repeated yet transformed, giving the impression of remembering the same man from different perspectives. There is nothing else in music quite like it.