This year's celebration was around two composers from two seemingly completely different planets. The Est Arvo Pärt (1935) turned eighty, the Frenchman Pierre Boulez (1925) ninety. One is unprecedentedly loved by a wide audience for his eloquent 'tintinnabulist style', the other is applauded by a select group of insiders for his avant-garde compositions, which the general public, however, experiences as incomprehensible 'plink-plonk'. Both composers were unmissable on the Dutch and international stages this year and seem to be celebrating an entire year's birthday.
At 80, Arvo Pärt is still a youthful figure, coming to our country this month to perform with the Cello8ctet Amsterdam to record a CD of his own work. Pierre Boulez proved too frail on his 90th birthday to attend any kind of celebration. That didn't stop the Utrecht ensemble Insomnio and Muziekhuis Utrecht from celebrating it exuberantly the next week, with a three-day festival which also involves the Tomoko Mukaiyama Foundation.
Listener centric
The festival opens in TivoliVredenburg's Great Hall on Tuesday 8 December, with two key works from Boulez' oeuvre: Répons - whose performance at the last Holland Festival in no time was sold out - and Dérive 2, which builds on its musical material. In Répons the ensemble of woodwinds, brass, strings and percussionists sit on stage, as do the conductor and several sound technicians. Around the audience, six more soloists and six loudspeakers are set up, so that as a listener you really are the centre of the musicians' question-and-answer game.
At Dérive 2 Boulez not only builds on the material from Répons, but he was also inspired by the layered rhythm of Hungarian György Ligeti, whose music he often performed as a conductor. However, he composed his piece for the eightieth birthday of Elliott Carter, the American grandmaster of atonal music. Unlike Boulez, Carter was still in top form at 90. Indeed, to the surprise of friend and foe alike, he even composed his first opera at that advanced age What next?
Le marteau sans maître
Pièce de résistance of the festival, however, is Le marteau sans maître (the hammer without a master) for singer and ensemble from the 1950s: Insomnio and conductor Ulrich Pöhl dedicate a public masterclass to it at the Muziekhuis on Wednesday 9 December and perform it at TivoliVredenburg on Thursday 10 December. They collaborated with Boulez on this piece for a CD recording in 2011, in conjunction with Pierrot lunaire By Arnold Schoenberg.
Le marteau sans maître is inspired by this seminal work, in which this innovator, once declared dead by Boulez, made the Sprechgesang (a form of talking singing) and the Flatterzunge introduced (blowing on a note while vibrating your tongue); Boulez also uses Sprechgesang. Remarkably, the Frenchman includes a guitar in the ensemble - as Schoenberg did earlier in Serenade, one of his first pure twelve-tone compositions.
In his piece, Boulez uses the texts mainly as sound material; he is not concerned with expressing the meaning of René Char's poems in music. Yet Le marteau sans maître you from the start, because of its rich and slender sound world, which at times recalls the impressionist music of Claude Debussy.
The festival seems a bit mustardy nine months after Boulez's birthday, but it is a fine tribute, a worthy conclusion to the Boulez year.
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