Royal Festival Hall, London
Boulez’s beguiling ...explosante-fixe... was accompanied by Harvey’s groundbreaking Bhakti and a UK premiere for Schoeller, all played authoritatively by the Paris-based contemporary music group
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.
Continue reading...from Music | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2xJri7u
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