Boulez-Maderna-Stockhausen 1958
Saturday, September 13, 2025
Berliner Philharmonie, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße, Berlin
Following Berliner Philharmoniker members’ appreciations of Pierre Boulez – the person, the composer and the conductor – François-Xavier Roth sculpted a magisterial account of Rituel, the pulse a little slower than Boulez himself or Michael Gielen, convincingly so, the instruments divided into the eight required groups and placed either on the platform or in various parts of the auditorium, all reaching the ear with clarity and good balance as this great piece journeys through increasing complexity over a slow-tread if varied foundation, here nearly thirty minutes (about five longer than the composer’s conducting of it): impressive-sounding and -looking, particularly the large brass choir.
The interval came now, to reconstitute the orchestra, first for Adámek’s new piece, Between Five Columns (with its own Boulezian connections; please click on the second link below) premiered last night, at first seeming to be about silence and sound, somewhat quixotically, for energy and impact became central to its ten minutes. Stravinsky’s Rite opened with an especially hung-onto bassoon solo, no problem for the player, and the performance as a whole was luxury-class in terms of execution if hit-and-miss interpretatively, be it tempos, details discovered, others submerged, if ending with a propulsive ‘Sacrificial Dance’, changes of metre sailed through, a state of hysteria created.
Pierre Boulez Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna
Ondřej Adámek Between Five Columns
Igor Stravinsky Le Sacre du printemps
https://www.berliner-philharmoniker.de/en/programme-notes/ondrej-adamek-between-five-columns