Boulez Ensemble XX

Not the Traditional “Three Bs”

The Boulez Ensemble Performs Beethoven, Bartók, and Boulez

Harry Haskell

Ludwig van Beethoven stood at the epicenter of the earthquake that transformed Europe’s musical landscape at the turn of the 19th century, and whose repercussions are still felt today. Pairing the Viennese master with two giants of 20th-century modernism may seem like a stretch, but in fact Beethoven, Bartók, and Boulez have a good deal in common as Janus-like figures embodying both the culmination of a tradition and its rejection. As French conductor François-Xavier Roth recently observed apropos of another program built around this unconventional triumvirate, all three composers “carry within themselves the idea of a musical utopia. Boulez combines post-war music with new music and the avant-garde in his works; Beethoven composed ‘pure’ music that conveys humanistic and political messages. Bartók’s compositions were influenced by the experiences of two world wars. His Concerto for Orchestra shows how music with roots in folklore can gain new power when it is supplied with a new musical architecture.”

Many scholars have called attention to Beethoven’s influence on Bartók, particularly the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. Indeed, the composer’s own program note on the piece emphasized its roots in Classical sonata form. Yet Bartók also testified that the “excesses of the Romanticists” had finally convinced him and many of his contemporaries that nothing less than a “complete break with the 19th century” would free them to forge new paths. Few composers broke more openly with the past than Boulez, but even he acknowledged a debt to Beethoven’s concentrated thematic development: “Even though he may use only three notes, the ramifications he draws from three notes may give rise to an entire movement.” For the Frenchman, Beethoven’s influence was nonetheless seminal for being subliminal. “Stylistically, you won’t find any of Beethoven’s late quartets in my music,” Boulez told an interviewer, “but they gave me the impetus to manipulate sound materials and imagine personal works.”

Beethoven: Piano and Horn

Beethoven cut his musical teeth in his native Bonn, then a relatively small provincial capital whose cultural life offered limited scope for a prodigiously gifted and ambitious young musician. In late 1792 he burst onto the scene in cosmopolitan Vienna and spent the rest of the decade burnishing his reputation as a pianistic powerhouse; upon hearing him play, his fellow virtuoso Wenzel Tomaschek was so overwhelmed that he refused to touch his own instrument for several days. In his first published opus, the three Piano Trios of 1795, Beethoven presented his credentials as an up-and-coming composer eager to step outside the long shadow cast by his mentor, Joseph Haydn. By his 13th year, the young tyro had an impressive clutch of masterpieces under his belt, including the six Op. 18 String Quartets, three piano concertos, the First Symphony, and the Septet for Winds and Strings.

The popular Septet capped a series of chamber works with wind instruments, a genre that Beethoven virtually abandoned after 1800. Early that year, however, his creative juices were stimulated once more by the arrival in Vienna of the celebrated Bohemian horn player known as Giovanni Punto (born Johann Wenzel Stich). On a mere two days’ notice, Beethoven agreed to compose a new piece for Punto’s debut at the Burgtheater. The resulting Sonata in F major was something of a novelty, since the horn was just coming into its own as a solo instrument and figured in only a handful of chamber works by Mozart, Punto, and others. Whether responding to the music itself or to Punto’s and Beethoven’s bravura performances, the first-night audience demanded to hear the entire piece twice, flouting a recent decree intended to promote decorum by prohibiting both loud applause and encores at the imperial theater.

Beethoven’s brilliant score played to Punto’s strengths as a pioneer of hand-stopping technique, and to his own as a keyboard virtuoso. (Deeming the Sonata beyond the reach of most amateur musicians, the publisher issued it simultaneously in a less technically challenging version for cello.) The first movement’s arpeggiated “horn call” motif, played by the hornist alone, is answered by a lightly skipping tune in the piano; but having set forth these suggestive themes Beethoven hardly bothers to develop them at all, concentrating instead on glistering passagework and rhythmic élan. A brief, harmonically searching Adagio interlude segues directly to the sprightly rondo-form finale. Throughout, Beethoven’s music spotlights the virtues that a contemporary critic catalogued in Punto’s playing: nuanced and varied tone production, “an agile tongue, dexterous in all forms of articulation,” and above all “a silver-bright and charming cantabile tone.”

Bartók: Pianos and Percussion

In his music as in his life, Béla Bartók straddled two starkly different worlds: the rich peasant culture of his native Hungary, where he conducted his pioneering ethnomusicological research at the beginning of the 20th century, and the violent, angst-ridden landscape of the poet W. H. Auden’s “Age of Anxiety.” The late 1930s was a heady and productive period for the composer. Relieved of his onerous teaching duties at the Budapest Academy of Music, he returned to the study of Hungarian folk music. Its endlessly varied store of melodies and rhythms combined with Bartók’s mastery of contrapuntal procedures led him to produce a string of boldly expressionistic masterpieces, including the Second Violin Concerto, the Sixth String Quartet, and the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion.

Bartók wrote the Sonata in 1937 at the behest of Paul Sacher, the Swiss conductor and musical Maecenas who also commissioned his Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936) and Divertimento for String Orchestra (1939). His original scheme called for a single piano, but he soon decided that two were necessary to offset “the often rather penetrating timbre of the percussion instruments.” The first performance of the Sonata took place in Basle on January 16, 1938, under the auspices of the International Society for Contemporary Music, with the composer and his second wife, Ditta Pásztory- Bartók, at the keyboards. Five years later, in the composer’s final public appearance as a pianist, the Bartóks played his double-concerto arrangement of the work with the New York Philharmonic.

The Sonata is laid out in three movements centering on C, F, and C, respectively. This tonal symmetry is reflected in the movements’ characters, with a dark, mysterious Lento sandwiched between a pair of brilliantly propulsive Allegros. The Assai lento— Allegro molto opens with a sinuous chromatic melody, punctuated by explosive outbursts and shuddering tremolos. A small battery of percussion instruments adds color and definition to the texture. Out of this slow, amorphous introduction emerges a brisk, sharply rhythmicized countersubject: listen for its insistent syncopated pattern throughout the first movement. Bartok’s themes are wonderfully varied, from the nervous stutters and swooping glissandos of the Lento to the perky, dance-like tune introduced by the xylophone in the finale. The combination of repetitive ostinatos and driving, irregular rhythms helps fuel the Sonata’s extraordinary vitality.

Boulez: Pianos, Percussion, and Harps

Notwithstanding Pierre Boulez’s reputation as a modernist firebrand wedded to a highly cerebral strain of serialism, emotion plays at least as large a role in his music as logic. For the Boulez Ensemble’s guiding spirit, clear-headed planning never precluded the possibility of surprise. “I need, or work with, a lot of accidents, but within a structure that has an overall trajectory—and that, for me, is the definition of what is organic,” Boulez once said. A case in point is his piano solo Incises, which translates loosely as “incisions,” “interpolations,” or possibly “splicings.” It began life in 1994 as a short test piece for a piano competition in Milan. Boulez subsequently elaborated on his jeu d’esprit in a dazzlingly inventive sequel called sur Incises (“On” or “About Incises”) for three pianos, three harps, and three percussion sets. That in turn inspired him to revise and expand Incises in 2001, resulting in a version nearly three times as long as the four-minute original.

All three works are based on a six-note tone row, or hexachord, that serves as a musical cipher for Sacher, the revered patron of Bartók and other 20th-century composers. Boulez’s cluster-like “Sacher chord”—first heard at the outset of sur Incises—and its various permutations provide an important structural element in the 40-minute piece. Conceived as a 90th-birthday offering to Sacher in 1996, sur Incises was inspired by the pianos-plus-percussion instrumentations of Bartók’s Sonata and Stravinsky’s Les Noces. Adding harps to the mix, Boulez recalled, injected the music with an exotic aura that “harkens back to Bali and to the African sphere.” The sparing use of steel drums, redolent of the African diaspora, created a further layer of cultural and timbral complexity. “If you play a sforzato on a grand piano, there’s not that much change to the actual sound,” the composer explained. “But with the steel drums you have a modification of the sound which sometimes even approaches electronic sounds—putting it closer to an electronic sound than to the sound of a normal acoustic instrument.”

This complex overlay of sonorities and associations is intrinsic to the expressive power of sur Incises. After what Boulez called a prefatory “cadenza for everyone,” the work passes through a series of wildly unpredictable yet carefully calibrated transitions, as dreamy, fantasylike passages alternate with music of a more brilliantly propulsive, toccata-like character. These contrasting sections are seamlessly intercut, creating a volatile mélange of clearly delineated structure and spontaneous-sounding “accidents.” In addition to highlighting the pianos’ brittle, percussive qualities, sur Incises incorporates the soft, shimmering resonances that prompted Boulez’s teacher, Olivier Messiaen, to observe that he had “totally transformed the sonority of the piano.” In fact, the work might be described as an exercise in denaturing instrumental sound. As Boulez put it, “I don’t use steel drums for the sake of their exotic and folkloric color but because of the fact that they exceed the usual bounds of the individual families of instruments. The question is, what does that mean? Because this sound belongs to all families and to none at the same time.”