Old for new

Published 12 February 1999

Classical by Dermot Clinch

The man tripping over my neighbour's stick was a former controller of Radio 3. Every chair in the Royal Festival Hall was occupied by a former controller of Radio 3. And every chair not occupied by a former controller of Radio 3 was occupied by someone who had at some point received the patronage of someone who was.

Such are the audiences for the music of Pierre Boulez, "one of the most distinguished yet controversial figures of 20th-century music" (Radio 3). The concert, conducted by Andrew Davis, was given by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, a wonderful band which Boulez himself conducted in the 1970s. In those days the Frenchman was famously dour and serious. Interviewed on television last week by the current controller of Radio 3, Boulez smiled and laughed, which seemed altogether remarkable. (When he was talking about concert-giving institutions in Paris, Boulez closed his eyes and shivered.)

Pierre Boulez is no Lenny Henry. But where he used to say things like "Schoenberg est mort!" or "Opera houses? Blow them up!", these days the angry young Frenchman, now in his seventies, is more likely to be heard telling how he was once a small mountain cascade, but is now a broad, old river with currents that run wide and deep and pacific. And if "A Life in Seven Chapters" - it was a long title for a short interview - hadn't indicated that change of heart, Boulez's recent romantic orchestrations of his own early music at the BBC concert did.

Time works wonders. It has softened the Boulez compositional manner, and it has sweetened the bitterness, tarnished the novelty, of works that once were bitingly new. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring still sounds angry after 80 years. Boulez, after ten or 20, can sound positively tame. Le Visage Nuptial - a choral work whose glacial tone matches the poetry of Rene Char that it sets - leaves one amazed at craftsmanship, refined palette, good aesthetic manners, but longing for comfort. The fizziest cello rasp, the most ravishing flash of divisi violins, will never make up for absence of human engagement.

Boulez once suggested, apropos his music, that "If a - {(b+n) - a} < n", then we should "inscribe it". What did he mean? He is in a distinguished line of French thinkers who have believed that science can explain everything and that their unique historical role is to ensure that it does. The BBC followed Boulez inside the Institut de Recherche et Co- ordination Acoustique-Musique, the composer's state-funded grand projet in Paris, dedicated to the technologisation of music. Here, amid a honeycomb of acoustic baffles, Boulez was Queen Bee, unassailed, for many years. We were sadly denied his answer, in 1992, to those who doubted the institute's historical necessity. "People have curious prejudices. They rejoice in the progress of washing machines and cars. But when it comes to art, you're supposed to stay with the candle. It's . . . inept."

But there were surprises in the BBC concert. Who would credit the gratifyingly banal "huff" and "puff" that illustrated the word "air" in a setting of e e cummings? Who would believe this composer capable of keeping a rhythm going long enough to allow a distinct hokey-cokey effect to slip in? Who would not fall down to be told that Boulez can, and sometimes does, admit consonance and even hummable melody into his music? Don't get Pierre Boulez wrong. He will for ever remain high priest of the institutionalised, atonal avant-garde. But he is less wicked than they say.

The BBC SO played Eclat/Multiples, a classic work in which the celebrated Boulez ear, capable of spotting a microtone at 40 paces, has been admired. But we were struck. Was the innovation, the exploration in this and later pieces - the business with mandolin, the alto flute, the three harps and two pianos, whatever interesting combination it may be - so remarkable, so self-evident these days? Debussy, Schoenberg, Webern: these are pioneers. (And in the case of thrumming harps, Hector Berlioz knows no peer.) Boulez the late, Boulez the follower, Boulez the epigone. A new angle at last.

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