Goldfinch and basalt, nebulae and sunlight glinting on the river Sorgue: Wednesday night’s concert at the Lucerne Festival was full of wild natural imagery, fluttering and flashing. Part of the festival’s celebration of Pierre Boulez’s work on the occasion of his centenary, the programme showcased work by Unsuk Chin and Robin de Raaff, bookended by two of Boulez’s poetic works.
American soprano Liv Redpath opened the evening with a gentle, muted take on Le Soleil des eaux. In Boulez’s bare-bones early-career work, the soprano voice is first left to stand almost naked, with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra fluttering and diffuse around her under Karina Canellakis’s controlled baton. Then the choir enters: barely present, a rumour, a whisper on the wind. The Netherlands Radio Choir sounded wonderful throughout the challenging programme (tuning forks glinting across the gallery), giving life to a wide range of textures and timbres, including Le Soleil des eaux’s unexpected bursts of violence.
The theme of the evening was Resonanz, both in the sense of thematic resonances between the works and in terms of echoes, overtones, sounds that shift and linger. These subtle textures are the tesserae of Unsuk Chin’s Piano Concerto, a complex and subtle work now nearly 30 years old which has lost none of its fiendish difficulty. Here, the piano is echoed, doubled, woven into the shifting orchestral fabric, a delicate choreography rendered with great precision and focus by Bertrand Chamayou. In her opening talk, the composer spoke of the Balinese gamelan as a source of inspiration and of her love for the piano’s “crystal-metallic sound”, but the glimmers of the bells and chimes also felt like a clear through-line to Boulez’s work.
Robin de Raaff’s new cantata for choir and orchestra, commissioned for this occasion, cites its sources even more directly. Moving the evening into less minimalist territory, L’Azur quickly takes form as a cinematic, even ebullient work. Canellakis – understated and elegant throughout the evening – coaxed sweeping statements and rich colours out of the orchestra. The work felt perhaps just a little too on the nose, tying things together a little too neatly, but it was warmly received.
One small caveat, while we’re on the subject of themes: overall, the programme was coherent and well thought out in terms of ideas, but on a production level, things were a little bit clunky, with long pauses to rearrange the stage in between pieces (not helped by a temporarily missing piano score), which made an ambitious programme feel ever so slightly overlong. Nevertheless, the evening’s stars were on fine form, and they had a real chance to shine in the final segment.
Here, we returned to our starting point, with Don, the first movement of Boulez’s Pli selon pli. Here, Redpath really got to step into the spotlight, her voice shading into something more mellow and complex, and the orchestra were also at their best with this delicate material. A texturally stunning work, even on this evening of interesting colours and textures – three harps! those explosions of percussion! a mandolin! – it brought the evening to a masterful close. I would have loved to hear the whole thing in this configuration, but the idea of ending the concert with an opening movement was a nice nod to the theme of this year’s festival, open end, the last note resonating for a long time in perfect silence.
