The second of the London Symphony Orchestra’s centenary tributes to Pierre Boulez was conducted by Maxime Pascal. As in the previous instalment, Boulez’s own music – the five orchestral Notations, Nos 1 to 4 and 7, that were completed at the time of his death – made up only a small part of the programme. Yet just as his influence as both composer and conductor pervaded so much of late 20th-century music, so it could be felt through all of Pascal’s programme, in which the three panels of Debussy’s Images – a work that Boulez himself conducted with peerless objectivity and exquisite feeling for its dazzling orchestral palette – were interleaved with three world premieres.
The first and shortest of those new works, commissioned by the LSO, was also the most effective. Olga Neuwirth’s Tombeau II: Hommage à Pierre Boulez, takes as its starting point one of the early piano Notations that Boulez did not orchestrate (the ninth), and turns it into a slow, menacing chorale clouded with microtones and decorated with harmonics and glissandos, which builds remorselessly to an abrupt climax.
It’s all over in a compelling five minutes, and the composer of at least one of the two works that had come out of the LSO’s Helen Hamlyn Panufnik Composers scheme might have learnt from it that less can mean a whole lot more. Rafael Marino Arcaro’s Invention in Language of Child had a handful of interesting textural ideas but stretched them over a hopelessly extended time frame; at half the length it was it would have had just as much impact. Certainly Lara Agar’s Suntime Bedtime Moontime was better proportioned, as its neat dawn-to-dusk scheme moved teasingly in and out of focus, hinting at whole musical worlds waiting to be explored at greater length.
On the podium, Pascal is a hyper-expressive conductor, but his performances never lacked anything in precision. Perhaps his approach to the Debussy pieces was a little on the cool side – there wasn’t much Spanish flavour to Iberia, for instance – but there was no shortage of intensity or power when it came to the Notations. The sensuous, delicate beauty of the first and seventh fiercely contrasted with the savagery and drive of the second and fourth.
