At Sunday night's final concert in the South Bank's weekend-long celebrations for Pierre Boulez's 75th birthday, the composer himself conducted a performance of his Pli Selon Pli with the soprano Valdine Anderson and the Ensemble Intercontemporain. The Festival Hall audience included a good dozen leading British composers, opera intendants and orchestral managers from two continents. The affectionate respect in which Boulez is held by those who have worked with him could not have been more fulsomely demonstrated.
In one sense Pli Selon Pli, completed in 1962, said everything about Boulez's achievement as a composer. He's written nothing better since this five-movement portrait of Mallarmé, which sums up his remarkable orchestral mastery and exhaustively explores the ways in which music and text can cohabit.
Pierre-Laurent Aimard's dazzling piano recital on Saturday afternoon presented the early Boulez, the 12 Notations from 1945 and the First Piano Sonata written a year later. More recent works were featured in the London Sinfonietta's two programmes, conducted by George Benjamin and Pierre-André Valade. Benjamin's programme included the modest Dérive and the potent Eclat. Valade gave a second London outing to the 1998 Sur Incises, which takes a little piano piece and multiplies it into a huge (although over long) study in shimmering resonances for trios of pianos, harps and tuned percussion.
There was a British premiere too. Anthèmes II sets a solo violin (Clio Gould here) in dialogue with computer-transformed images of itself that are projected in real time around the auditorium. It's revealing that Boulez's explorations of new technology allow him to replicate electronically the same multiplicative ideas that he uses on paper in pieces like Sur Incises. Anthèmes contains gorgeous effects, but is protracted.
The South Bank had also arranged a special birthday present, inviting 12 composers to produce a set of piano pieces to mirror Boulez's own Notations. Only a few pieces - an aqueous flurry of figuration from Berio, a fractured melody from Birtwistle, sinewy lyricism from Elliott Carter - really stood out. George Benjamin's offering was naughty but nice, taking a series of chords from Boulez's Dérive and arranging to spell out the tune of Happy Birthday.
Rolf Hind's performance, a real tour de force, was recorded by Radio 3, and within an hour CD copies were being distributed to members of the audience - a wonderful initiative that has immense potential. A tireless educator and facilitator, Boulez himself would thoroughly approve.
