Chamayou, BBC Philharmonic, Wigglesworth, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - Boulez with bonbons

Top Brownie points for the BBC Philharmonic for being one of the first (maybe the first?) to celebrate the birth centenary of Pierre Boulez this year. His Rituel – in memoriam Bruno Maderna was paired somewhat uneasily with a second half of bonbons by Ravel (it’s his 150^th anniversary year, too).

Mark Wigglesworth was the maestro who piloted both parts of the programme, however, showing equally calm assurance and sympathy with their differing idioms.

Boulez’ tribute to another 20^th century modernist was the longest piece on the list, and made a suitably solemn tribute as well as providing early occupation for the nine percussionists who were to be needed later for the second suite from Daphnis et Chloé.

There are those who observe a defining fascination with timbre in almost all French music since Debussy, and though that hardly makes a convincing parallel between Boulez and Ravel, the instrumentation of Rituel – in memoriam Bruno Maderna certainly makes an impression in its own right. It may not be so obvious to those who listen to this on the radio when it finally makes it to the airwaves, but in the hall there was the visual impact of separate cohorts of players arranged around the space: 14 brass players, with an array of gongs behind them, central on the platform; other groups at the sides and still others aloft on the auditorium levels above them. They’re used in varying alternations and combinations to create succeeding changes of texture and complexity, in an overall arch structure (comprising for much of the time a succession of what Boulez called versets and répons, following one another as if in a liturgy), which seem to grow and then diminish.

Boulez planned it in an obsession with the number seven, using what he said was an “Asian funeral dirge” of seven notes. There is a sense of solemn obsequy, and a slow, funeral tread is rarely absent from the percussive sounds heard. And a solo oboe seems to act as cantor, particularly at the outset. So the “ritual” takes the form of both quasi-verbal observance and, quite possibly, an outdoor procession.

There are intriguing sonic effects from the undamped resonances and sympathetic vibrations of the gongs, quite separately from the broad slabs of brass sound they introduce and follow, and at the close their fading waves gradually merged into the barely audible hum of the air conditioning – perhaps a realization of what Boulez meant when he said he was evoking both death and survival. After the 25 minutes of the piece, a break was needed if only to re-set the platform for the more conventional orchestral resources and ground plan of Ravel’s orchestra (which took longer to achieve than all the music heard thus far).

But once the piano had been installed for the Piano Concerto in G – the jazzy one for two hands – we entered a different world. Bertrand Chamayou is a very remarkable pianist (pictured above with Wigglesworth and the orchestra): often tender and thoughtful (and evoking respectful echoes of these qualities among the orchestral wind solos), undemonstrative and at times almost self-effacing, yet performing with brilliance and bewitching virtuosity in his first-movement cadenza. In the enchanting central Adagio all was clean and neo-classical (the movement shaped, with Wigglesworth’s help, to sing out in its high points), and the finale was a romp.

Then came a world premiere – of an arrangement of Ravel for orchestra: his early two-part piano work, Sites auriculaires, having been given instrumentation by Kenneth Hesketh. It must have been an interesting challenge, as Ravel himself orchestrated its first section, “Habanera”, himself when he wrote Rapsodie espagnole.

Hesketh writes that he set out to make “a type of gentle oppositional or negative orchestration” of it, and the uncanny thing is that his version still sounds unmistakably Ravellian. The second of the two short pieces, “Entre cloches”, is if anything, less typical, and more like Rimsky-Korsakov (appropriate enough for the time of the original).

Another brief example followed, this time of Ravel orchestrated by Ravel, in the popular Pavane pour une infante defunte – its reprise exquisitely song-like and beautiful in Mark Wigglesworth’s hands – before, finally, the Daphnis et Chloé suite, which begins with the wonderful musical picture of “Lever du jour” and ends with the exhilarating “Danse Générale” from the ballet.

The whole programme had been promoted on the basis that it contained this music (perhaps mindful that the complete work has been championed in Manchester by Sir Mark Elder with the Hallé, most recently in October 2023), and it fulfilled its promise: the opening skilfully balanced, melodically led and finely proportioned (gorgeous flute playing by Alex Jakeman) under the Wigglesworth baton. 

• To be broadcast on Radio 3 on Tuesday 11 March 
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