Boulez Ensemble XVII - Matthias Pintscher

Forms of Dialogue

The Boulez Ensemble Plays Pintscher and Debussy

Thomas May

The complex phenomena associated with a dialogue —musical, social, intellectual, emotional—inform the core of Matthias Pintscher’s musical thinking, whether in his guise as composer, conductor, or teacher. In an interview with the immunologist Jacques Banchereau on the topic of creative inspiration, Pintscher remarked that “these musical objects start talking and erasing each other or clashing and transforming, and then you start developing the drama, the narrative, the story.”

Today’s program culminates in the first performance of Pintscher’s new commission for the Pierre Boulez Saal, NUR, a piano concerto that he describes as essentially a dialogue between the soloist and the ensemble musicians. The late-period trio sonata by Claude Debussy, a composer of central significance to Pintscher since he began writing his own music in his teen years, suggests a dialogue of aesthetic values between past and present. And Pintscher engages in dialogue with his own musical past in the opening piece, Verzeichnete Spur.

Trace and Erasure: Pintscher’s Verzeichnete Spur

Still another species of dialogue—between his identities as composer and conductor—has proved to be a spur for artistic discovery. “Whenever I come back to something that I already knew years ago, I have to prepare it once again,” Pintscher says. “That’s true even for my own scores. I have to relearn how to interpret them. Often, you end up taking tempi too fast when you’re younger. You learn over time to respect the humanity of the sound, to give it more space. I think it’s interesting to see how Pierre Boulez, in his old age, became more transparent in his interpretations.”

Verzeichnete Spur dates from 2005; the world premiere took place in March 2006 in Brussels, with Pintscher leading the Klangforum Wien. Scored for double bass and three cellos and an ensemble of bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet, percussion, harp, and piano, it also includes a part for live electronics, a tool Pintscher has used relatively rarely in his work. Recently, at IRCAM, he substantially revised the electronic component; therefore, this performance also represents something of a premiere.

The ensemble assembled for NUR made it logistically feasible to revisit Verzeichnete Spur. Indeed, both works inhabit similar soundscapes, Pintscher observes. In his title, which might be rendered “Recorded Trace,” he refers to the paradoxical interplay between memory and amnesia, between enduring presence and willful forgetfulness. “It’s what happens when you try to erase a trace that you have laid out, but it remains in your ear,” Pintscher explains. “Even when something is laid on top of it, you continue to feel that original trace.”

Pintscher cites a simile from the visual arts—a significant stimulus for several of this art connoisseur’s other compositions—singling out the “color fields” of Mark Rothko. “Beneath the red and brown paintings, for example, there may lurk multiple layers—black, yellow, blue—which have been painted over. You can’t see them but you feel them.” Or, to stay within the musical realm, he homes in on Schubert’s Moments musicaux. “They emanate beautiful surfaces, but underneath can be very dark, an abyss. No composer has been so profoundly melancholy even when writing in C major!”

To Laugh or Cry: Debussy’s Late Trio Sonata

Pintscher’s affinity for Claude Debussy has remained a constant in his work as composer and conductor. He compares the French artist’s attention to the subtlest details with the ingenious invention of Joseph Haydn, at the same time underscoring his difference from Maurice Ravel, whose name is often casually mentioned in tandem with Debussy. “Ravel is simpler, like a Porsche that almost drives by itself. With Debussy, you have to actively work to get each measure, color, balance, and detail to have the right sound.”

Last year, the music world paid tribute to the 100th anniversary of the death of the French composer—who succumbed to the cancer that had ailed him for a long time in the same year that the First World War, another cause of much grief for Debussy, came to a halt.

The outbreak of the war in 1914 triggered a strongly patriotic reaction, which, for Debussy, took the form of pride in French art and a new appreciation for the achievements of the French composers of the 18th century. He envisioned a cycle of six sonatas—a musical form that itself pays homage to musical tradition—in which each work would call for a different grouping of instruments. But he completed only three of these before he became too ill to continue composing. The Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp is the second of the set (bookended by sonatas for cello and piano and for violin and piano); it was completed in 1915 and premiered not in Paris but in Boston (in 1916).

This interest in the sonata indicates a noticable shift for Debussy, who had avoided classical genre labels since his early years, instead favoring titles that showed his inspirations from literature and the visual arts—such as Prélude à l’aprèsmidi d’un faune (“Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun”), which was inspired by the Symbolist poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé. The result was a milestone of musical modernism that turns away from classical models to create its own form; some commentators even argue that modern Western music was born here.

But the sonata project represents a different kind of innovation: a transplantation of ideas inspired by the past to the context of a new era. Debussy’s choice of instrumentation alone stands out and became the standard for a new kind of chamber music formation. In fact, he initially contemplated writing a trio for flute, oboe, and harp but soon decided to exchange the oboe for a viola.

The first of the Sonata’s three movements, Pastorale, introduces the world inhabited by this exquisite score. Debussy presents his material with utmost economy and concision, varying the meter and trying out different combinations of the instruments: flute in the foreground, flute and viola, viola and harp, all three together. An Interlude recalls the oldfashioned, triple-meter dance form known as the minuet, but its harmonies reverberate with the modern language Debussy had cultivated (frequently labeled “Impressionist,” though the composer scorned the term). In the Finale, he finds still more ways to play with this ravishing combination of instrumental timbres and textures. Near the conclusion, the music becomes slower and echoes the material that opened the Sonata—the end a reflection of the beginning, as if always already there. Of the Trio Sonata, Debussy himself wrote that is was “so beautiful that I almost have to apologize for it.” At the same time, he acknowledged its complex emotional makeup: “It’s frightfully melancholy, and I don’t know if one should laugh or cry. Perhaps both?”

Metallic Brilliance and Shadow Sounds: Pintscher’s New “Fire” Concerto

Matthias Pintscher’s oeuvre to date comprises numerous concertos, each of which reconsiders the genre and casts it in a novel framework: Transir for flute, his two violin concertos en sourdine and Mar’eh, and the double-trumpet concerto Chute d’Étoiles – Hommage à Anselm Kiefer (presented in 2012 as part of Lucerne Festival’s prestigious Roche Commissions of eminent living composers). Curiously, he resisted repeated pleas to write a piano concerto for decades before at last accepting a commission from the Daniel Barenboim Stiftung together with Paul Sekhri and the Sekhri Family Foundation to create the work that receives its world premiere today.

“To be honest, I felt I had nothing to contribute to the repertoire and so for many years was reluctant to write a piano concerto. Then, suddenly, everything seemed to align,” Pintscher explained in a recent interview. In addition to his friendship with the New York-based arts philanthropist Paul Sekhri, a passionate aficionado of the piano literature, he developed a closer relationship with Daniel Barenboim over the past two years. “My resistance began to give way, and I found I had the courage to take on the open invitation Paul had extended to write a concerto for the piano.”

A careful, methodical worker at his composing desk, Pintscher expresses delighted astonishment that, in the face of so much hesitation, NUR came pouring out as if in one go over the course of a mere few weeks last summer, when he was back in his New York City home. (Like Mahler, summer is when he is freest to devote himself to composition.) “It turned out to be one of the pieces I’ve most naturally been able to put down on paper,” he recalls.

“Nur” is a transliteration of the Hebrew word for fire or light ‏,(רוּנ)‏ which, Pintscher points out, is a word shared by Arabic ( )—where it also appears as the name (male or female) Noor. “I think a title should speak for itself about the music,” he says, preferring to distance himself from verbal explanations and elaborations of events and relationships that happen in the music itself. “My main inspiration for the title was that it could comprise multiple layers and represent various forms of fire, all sorts of states.”

“Fire” is of course an abundantly associative poetological term that can connote myth, ritual, and even artistic metaphor alongside its material signification. NUR unfolds within a sound world of fertile contrasts: the “metallic brilliance” of the piano and, underneath, the “shadow sound” of the chamber ensemble. “The piano rises up from this acoustically dark space,” says Pintscher. NUR, for him, is less a piano concerto per se than a “dialogue between this metallic instrument and what it elicits in the sonic realm of the orchestra.”

To what extent did Barenboim’s pianism influence his imagination? An evening years ago with the Berlin Philharmonic and Barenboim as the soloist in a Mozart concerto has remained indelibly imprinted on his memory as “a genuine highlight of my life listening to music. That’s when my admiration for this complete musician and humanist really began. I see him very much like Boulez as untiring curious.” For Pintscher, the combination of “intellectual acuity and at the same time incredible spontaneity” is what characterizes Barenboim’s personality at the keyboard: “Calculation and an instinct to appreciate the moment work together with a great simplicity.”