© Harald Hoffmann
Arch-modernists are rarely teen idols. But for Olga Neuwirth, Pierre Boulez was just that. In an eloquent tribute to the great composer-conductor, written a year after his death, Neuwirth described how as a 16-year-old she had been ‘completely captivated by [his] musical personality … His uttermost conviction that we are living in the here and now and that we must think and write music accordingly.’ The pair eventually met in 1998 (‘I doubt if I’ll get a word out, my awe in the face of this towering composer,’ she wrote at the time in her journal), and two years later, Boulez conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in the premiere of her Clinamen/Nodus, commissioned for his 75th-birthday. This March we celebrate what would have been Boulez’s 100th birthday. For the occasion, Neuwirth has written two homages, the second of which is premiered tonight.
Tombeau II takes as its starting point an early work by Boulez: the ninth of his 12 Notations for solo piano (1945). Boulez orchestrated five of these miniatures later in his career but never got to the murky, introspective Notations IX, subtitled ‘Lointain-Calme’ (‘DistantCalm’). Rather than creating a straightforward orchestration, Neuwirth takes the essential musical material and expands it vertically as well as horizontally – through ‘augmentation of the rhythmic and figurative elements to almost sustained notes, thus creating a kind of layering – an echo of the original work’. Her process reflects two of Boulez’s preoccupations: that a musical composition is forever ‘in progress’ (he continuously reworked his own music), and that it’s duration should be proportional to the size of the ensemble performing it, hence Tombeau II lasting three times longer than Notations IX.
The pulsing, densely layered texture that Neuwirth creates – full of microtones and colourful performing techniques such as sliding, ‘glissando’ harmonics, bowed percussion and flutter tongues – is typical of her style. And where Notations IX shyly sputters out, Tombeau II builds and builds, ending with a monstrous, whole-orchestra crescendo – what Neuwirth describes as ‘a huge outcry – despair or anger. You can decide …’ This dramatic narrative, and the work’s overall sensuality, reflect the influence of another cultural colossus: Richard Wagner. For Neuwirth, Wagner’s music evokes ‘a kind of delirium’ – one which Boulez explored intensively as a conductor, most famously at Bayreuth for Patrice Chéreau’s controversial 1976 production of the Ring cycle. Though miniscule in comparison to that work, Tombeau II packs a punch that would make Boulez proud.