Devout atheist that he was, the late Pierre Boulez would have been amused to find one of his works featured in a programme that had been shoe-horned into the year-long Belief and Beyond Belief festival at the Southbank Centre, London. But his … explosante-fixe … has become one of the signature works of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the house band of IRCAM in Paris, which Boulez himself founded in 1976, and no further justification is needed for the chance to hear their dazzling performance of it once again.
What began in 1971 as a memorial to Stravinsky, a flat-pack collection of musical fragments with several pages of accompanying instructions on how to perform them, was elaborated and refined by Boulez over the following two decades into a 35-minute piece for solo flute, two further flutes, ensemble and real-time electronics. In the final version of … explosante-fixe … the solo flute is echoed and shadowed by its two congeners, while their trills and arabesques and those of the ensemble are digitally transformed and sent spinning around the auditorium to create dazzling, constantly shifting webs of sound. It’s one of Boulez’s most immediately beguiling and approachable works, and one of the classics of electro-acoustic music.
Sophie Cherrier, who gave the first performance in 1993, was the coolly expert solo flautist here, too, with Matthias Pintscher conducting the EIC, but the Festival Hall isn’t the best space for its delicate interplay of live and electronic sounds, and the balance between the two wasn’t always as convincing as it could be.
Another groundbreaking exploration of instrumental and electronic sounds, Jonathan Harvey’s Bhakti from 1982, fared a bit better at the beginning of the concert. It was one of the first pieces to demonstrate the musical potential of the electronic hardware that IRCAM was developing in its early days, and though its use of prerecorded tape now seems awkward and outdated, the sounds themselves, seamlessly morphing from the live to the synthesised, are still ravishing, and its link with Hindusim – each of the 12 sections is headed by a quotation from the Rig Veda – at least connected with the Belief series.
Philippe Schoeller’s Hermes V, the final part of a projected cycle of pieces inspired by the legend of the Greek god, which was receiving its UK premiere, made little impression, though its command of colour and texture was expert enough in a post-Boulezian way, and the ensemble played it authoritatively.
