Boulez sur Incises
Boulez Ensemble & Daniel Barenboim
Musical Performance Ensemble & Orchestra 0Three pianos, three harps, three percussionists—the unusual combination of instruments Pierre Boulez chose for one of his most expansive scores is the starting point for music that is dramatically charged and highly emotional, whose sound colors are powerful, finely chiseled, and rich in modulation in equal measure. As often in the composer’s oeuvre, sur Incises is based on an earlier work that he developed further over the course of the years, allowing it to grow musically: Incises (“Incisions”), a five-minute piece for solo piano, had been written in 1994 on commission from the Umberto Micheli Piano Competition in Italy. The occasion for sur Incises was the 90th birthday of the Swiss conductor and patron of the arts Paul Sacher in 1996. The musical material is based on the so-called “Sacher hexachord” (consisting of the notes eS-A-C-H-E-Re, “Es” and “H” being German notation for E flat and B, and “Re” French notation for D), which Boulez also used in other works. At the Pierre Boulez Saal, sur Incises was first heard during the opening concert on March 4, 2017—a performance captured in this recording.
A co-production of UNITEL and RBB in cooperation with ARTE and Pierre Boulez Saal.
Pierre Boulez (1925–2016)
sur Incises for Three Pianos, Three Harps, and Three Percussionists (1996–98, rev. 2006)
Moment I
Moment II
Daniel Barenboim Conductor
Denis Kozhukhin, Michael Wendeberg, Karim Said Piano
Aline Khouri, Susanne Kabalan, Stephen Fitzpatrick Harp
After a first rush of startling, sudden achievements, culminating in Le Marteau sans maître, Pierre Boulez entered a creative steady state, in which works would remain for long periods in progress, to be revised or expanded, in accordance with his view that music, no longer bound by the tonal cadence, was capable of endless ramifications. So it was here. In 1994 he dashed off a short piece for a piano competition: Incises (the term is used most often to refer to parenthetical clauses in a contract or other such document). The following year he started work on a big development, sur Incises, in which the solo piano of the original is multiplied threefold thrice, so that the music ripples through an ensemble made up of three pianists and three players each on instruments that are, color-wise, next door: harps and tuned percussion.
In Incises he had worked, as in several earlier pieces, with a set of chords using notes derived from the surname of the Swiss patron Paul Sacher: E flat (Es in German)–A–C–B (again counting for H)–E–D (ré in French). His intention for sur Incises was that it should celebrate Sacher’s 90th birthday, in April 1996, but only a ten-minute fragment was ready by then, to be performed at concerts honoring Sacher in Basel and Paris. The full work, almost four times as long, was completed in 1998 and revised in 2006. Its ending in this form sounds pretty conclusive, but part of the point of the piece is that new beginnings are always possible—that even when the material seems exhausted and the instruments burned out (the instrumentalists, too, perhaps…), the music might still, in some elsewhere of the imagination, be spinning on.
In Incises Boulez had put forward two kinds of idea: a rapid toccata-style mobility marked by stutterings of immediate note repetition, and strummings at the bottom of the keyboard. These latter form the basis for the start of sur Incises—sunken bell music for pianos and harps plus a fluttering marimba, all of them fixed at first on a low F, suggesting perhaps entrapment, lethargy, or just a circling round the territory, exploring what is at hand before any decisive project is undertaken. As the music begins then to dart, linger, plummet in steadily increasing anticipation, the other two percussionists join the ensemble on vibraphones. A few minutes into the piece, the marimba offers a distinct rising scale (Boulez’s term for such gestures, which recur through the piece, is levée, an action of lifting) and the whole ensemble is off at high speed, careering through passages of insistent regular repetition from one register to another, harmonies and colors aswirl.
This lasts until about the ten-minute mark, where the cascade falters, the percussion instrumentation becomes deeper, more somber (steel drums, timpani, marimba), and the music returns to its opening character on a new bass focus, C sharp. Pianos and harps shoot off again, but the pull of the weightier percussion, the low C sharp, and the slow tempo keeps reasserting itself. At last the original nonet is resumed for another high-speed toccata, but only briefly before this music is interrupted—first by a calmer solo from the second piano—and soon largely supplanted by a flow of such mostly slower passages, for constantly varying groups caught together in entanglements and chimes, these occupying the whole central third of the piece.
Eventually a succession of waves leaves behind a new rapidity in which an upper treble B flat is constantly being emphasized, and this note remains strongly in evidence as the work winds down through further varying textures until just the three pianos are at play. In the final stages the musicians come together in a resonant eleven-note chord that is a summons to close. At first subverted, the summons is repeated, and this time its notes are picked off in successive chords to make at last an ending.
It will readily be observed that Boulez’s ensemble is very different from Webern’s or Schumann’s in owing nothing to any traditional formation. On the other hand, the combination of pianos and percussion has strong precedents in Stravinsky (Les Noces) and Bartók (Sonata). Nearer at hand are works of Boulez’s own—notably Éclat (1965), which also features a nine-piece percussive group, but on diverse instruments, and his two Improvisations sur Mallarmé of 1957, similarly scored. The sonnet Boulez chose for the first of these latter—“Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui,” with its image of a swan caught on a frozen lake—has its parallel in this opus ultimum: in its intense frustrated activity, luminosity, fluidity, and whirling into the infinite.
—Paul Griffiths
Notes originally published in the Pierre Boulez Saal program book for the concert of the Boulez Ensemble on September 9, 2018.
Conductor
Daniel Barenboim
Percussion
Lev Loftus, Pedro Torrejón González, Dominic Oelze
Piano
Denis Kozhukhin, Michael Wendeberg, Karim Said
Harp
Aline Khouri, Susanne Kabalan, Stephen Fitzpatrick
Video Director
Henning Kasten
Camera
Tobias Albrecht
Maik Behres
Michael Boomers
Boris Fromageot
Winifried Herrmann
Stefan Kochinke
Martin Roth
Erik Thon
Annett Zimmermann
Crane operators
Matthias Wahle
Peter Zoephel
Audio Producer
Friedermann Engelbrecht
Audio Engineers
Julian Schwenker
Sebastian Nattkemper
Audio Postproduction
Thomas Bössl
Video Technicians
Piet Grotelüschen
Arno Scholwin
Felix Schlag
Lighting Designer
Mario Klapper
Lighting Technicians
René Gamsa
Jörn Scholz
Fin Ole Langer
Ulf Keilhofer
Video Operator
Mark C. Rump
Graphics Operator
Kilian Hirt
Video Editors
Anna Druggemeester
Uli Peschke
Assistant Stage Director
Martin Feil
Unit Manager
Ines Kadgien
Commissioning Editors Arte
Christian von Behr
Dorothea Diekmann
Sabine Muller
Executive Producer Salve TV
Karl-Martin Lötsch
UNITEL
Post production Manager
Roger Voß
Production Manager
Franziska Pascher
Producer
Magdalena Herbst
A co-production of UNITEL and RBB in cooperation with ARTE and Pierre Boulez Saal.
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