Wednesday, July 23, 2025
Royal Albert Hall, London
1925: Pierre Boulez and Luciano Berio born, the Frenchman in March, the Italian October.
Trombonist as clown in Berio’s Sequenza V. If anyone was napping in RAH or at home (R3 switched on), Lucas Ounissi’s first note, a blast out of darkness, will have acted as a wake-up call, going on to release numerous gurgles, rumbles, staccatos, and stratospheric cries. Brilliant playing, no hiding place. Boulez’s Dialogue (dedicated to Berio on his sixtieth-birthday) is also a solo, clarinet this time, Jérôme Comte duetting with his pre-recorded self – foreground, background, timbral opposites, a feverish journey of discovery undertaken with jaw-dropping address, Comte ending not where he started.
Both soloists are members of the Boulez-founded Ensemble intercontemporain, their colleagues and Pierre Bleuse with Sarah Aristidou arriving for Berio’s Recital I (for Cathy) – Cathy Berberian (another centenarian, and a wife of the composer) – a score rich in keyboards (three pianos, harpsichord, and organ, seventeen musicians in total), a music-theatre piece, soprano as an ever-demented/-disillusioned diva, a tour de force performance from Aristidou, with quotations from Monteverdi and later Italian opera, Brahms (Finale of Violin Concerto), Schoenberg (Pierrot Lunaire), Prokofiev (Alexander Nevsky) and some that got away from me, including Mahler and Schubert, apparently. Even on radio, without the visuals, Recital I held the attention.
Berio: Sequenza V
Boulez: Dialogue de l’ombre double
Berio: Recital I (for Cathy)
Sarah Aristidou, soprano
Jérôme Comte, clarinet
Lucas Ounissi, trombone
IRCAM, live electronics
Ensemble intercontemporain
Pierre Bleuse
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002ftm2
“This season we celebrate the careers of 20th-century game-changers Pierre Boulez and Luciano Berio, whose inventive, iconoclastic legacies continue to echo through the sounds, styles and techniques of today. The Ensemble intercontemporain – founded by Boulez in 1976 – and Pierre Bleuse celebrate the pair in a concert full of sonic theatre.”