San Francisco Classical Voice

David Robertson

The Ensemble Intercontemporain, founded in Paris by Pierre Boulez in 1976, is widely considered to be the world's finest organization devoted to the performance of the music of our time. Their presence in the Bay Area this week -- at Stanford April 14 and 15, and at UC Berkeley April 16 and 17 -- justified that reputation. Under their director, the American David Robertson, they presented two stunning evening performances and two remarkable reading sessions of student works, one on each campus.

The Stanford performance included two works by major figures and two by composers who are less familiar, but all of them demonstrated a vitality and strength of concept, a desire to search, and a willingness to dare to take risks. Boulez' Dérive, based on six notes derived from the name of Swiss conductor/patron Paul Sacher, is a wonder of elegant invention, constantly drifting yet clearly directed -- an object lesson in making much out of little. Carter's Clarinet Concerto, superbly played by Alain Damiens, ranks among the composer's notable efforts. The soloist, moving from station to station on the platform, and the ensemble, subdivided so as to produce Carter's preferred spatial groupings, projected a quicksilver dialogue which was breathtaking in Robertson's tight yet fluid performance.

Philippe Hurel's Six miniatures en trompe-l'oeil ("optical illusion") is a vivid, dynamic work with aggressive, complex chord structures in hyper-active, sometimes jazz-like themes. In spite of the aggressively dissonant materials, the image of Big Band swing, which also states its rhythm harmonically rather than with percussion, was clearly evident. Unsuk Chin demonstrated a highly sensitive ear for the combination of traditional instruments and electronics, prepared in part at the Technical University in Berlin. Her work, Xi, meaning "kernel" or "origin," deconstructs traditional instrumental sounds beyond recognition. It then uses the result in an ultimately mammoth pattern of breath-based crescendo-diminuendo gestures moving from noise to pitch and back again. Hurel and Chin are not well-known here. They are composers with vivid imaginations and admirable technical control; one hopes to hear more of them.

The Berkeley program began with Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat, apparently standing in for a previously scheduled work by Tristan Murail. Murail is a major international figure virtually ignored in the U.S., so one hopes the Ensemble will include it on its next trip here. Stand-in or no, the performance was incisive and polished, with Jeanne-Marie Conquer's violin projecting its fateful catalytic role between the soldier and the devil. Iannis Xenakis' Thallein for 14 instruments uses sound masses in microtonal inflections which ultimately move through scalewise patterns to the final glissandi, where all the strings begin on the same note, then individually glissando to different pitches, producing the acoustical parallel of the hyperbolic paraboloid structure of his 1953 Metastasis (and also of the 1958 Philips Pavilion in Brussels, for which he was the Project Architect). It is mural-like music, gigantic in concept and scale, and the mark of a major musical personality.

Franco Donatoni's Spiri (Italian for "spiral" or "coil") was an acoustical wonder -- sparse, subtle, eloquently circling fragments winding around themselves and each other with unexpected but perfectly timed silences (delivered by Robertson with perfect timing). Three strings and three winds sit facing each other with vibraphone and celesta between. In the center, standing to denote solo function, are violin and oboe, their breathless filigrees flawlessly delivered by Maryvonne Le Dizès and László Hadady. The piece recalled a remark Donatoni had made to me when he held the Chair of Italian Culture at Berkeley: "I don't want to go somewhere, I want to dig deeper into where I am." So much for Modern Language Association composers who think that everything has to be a "narrative".

Not flagging for a moment, the program ended with Ligeti's difficult, four-movement piano concerto, the demanding solo part brilliantly played by Florent Boffard. Ligeti's complex rhythmic and metric evolutions, dramatic contrasts, and exploitation of register seemed to flow from his fingers with a consummate ease, and Robertson's shaping of the ensemble's interactions established a sensitive context for the piano's role.

The large Berkeley audience responded enthusiastically -- shouts of "bravo" for the Donatoni, four curtain-calls for the Xenakis and no fewer than five for the Ligeti. (When was the last time you heard a concert of "accessible" contemporary music which drew that kind of response? Audiences are not brain-dead, after all.) The response is not surprising. This is simply a once-in-a-lifetime ensemble and it is easy to see why David Robertson was Boulez' choice to lead them: the conducting is beautifully controlled, precise yet fluid, and always eloquently timed. In the student reading sessions, Robertson's comments to the young composers were simply brilliant.

The Ensemble's appearance here should be an annual event. We will all be richer for it.

(Composer Richard Felciano is founder of UC Berkeley's Center for New Music and Audio Technologies [CNMAT]. )

©1999 Richard Felciano, all rights reserved