Maxime Pascal and the LSO pay homage to Pierre Boulez in magnificent style

It's still only January but the centenary celebrations for Pierre Boulez are gathering pace. At the Barbican, the London Symphony Orchestra under Maxime Pascal served up a thrilling tribute to that child of our time – or at least of my time – and left me dumbstruck. A tantalising programme consisted of Debussy’s Images (with which Boulez excelled as a conductor), interleaved by three pieces all receiving their world premiere, and a bookend that redefines the meaning of that term, Boulez’s Notations. I won’t say much about the Debussy trilogy except to note that Pascal was highly impressive; he has the work in his heart and made the orchestra his co-conspirators in a reading of pure joy.

All the new pieces were refined offerings worthy of their role in honouring the maître. Olga Neuwirth gave us Tombeau II. Hommage à Pierre Boulez. It is a daring commentary on Notations IX where the original material is enriched with vivid colours formed by microtones, harmonics and sensuous string writing. It received an intensely expressive performance ending with a fiery, ecstatic climax for the whole orchestra. Rafael Marino Arcaro and Lara Agar are alumni of LSO Discovery programme for composers which, if judged by the quality of their pieces, is an initiative worthy of high praise. Arcaro’s Invention in language of child summons up reveries of his idyllic childhood in Brazil with a disarming artlessness; his sound world is full of the ethereal emanations born of innocence of the ‘real’ world and which we take to our grave. A hauntingly beautiful piece was played and conducted with intensity and verve. 

The performers were similarly at one with Agar’s sense of childhood enchantment in her Suntime bedtime moontime. She handles sonic space with a strong sense of how time contorts itself – or can be made to – through imaginative instrumentation and a fine line in pacing. The piece, rising rapturously from the page, ended abruptly and left me wishing to hear more.

Notations started life as a set of twelve piano pieces composed in 1945, each twelve bars long, and which were swiftly withdrawn. Their re-emergence in the 1970s led Boulez into orchestrating them, prompted by Daniel Barenboim. The first four were done quite quickly, but the next piece, the seventh, appeared almost 20 years later. What we have are not mere orchestrations, but a masterful transformation of the material by an intellectual fast-breeder reactor. Pascal presented the pieces in the order preferred by Boulez: 1,7,4,3,2, The first four were by turns radiant, soporific, transcendent, mournful; there were moments when I experienced what I imagine Lucy-in-the-sky must have felt on her diamond-studded trip.

With shredded nerves I mustered sufficient resilience to face the onslaught of number 2, a doom-laden, apocalyptic thundering. I’m not the first person to hear in this piece a scintillating reference to The Rite of Spring, which might be Boulez’s own homage to Stravinsky. However, the way it was played left no doubt that it is far more brutal than the ending of The Rite. Where the latter takes death as the price of life, the former struck me as a statement of complete annihilation and a contender for the most terrifying music ever written. Both orchestra and conductor were complicit in making it so. It was simply magnificent. I think that if Boulez had completed the remaining seven pieces, performances of the full sequence would have to be preceded by a trigger warning, especially if the performers were the same as on this occasion.