B-Sides: Boulez and Barraqué in Boston
Boston Conservatory New Music Festival
”Celebrating Boulez: Discovering Barraqué”
Jennifer Ashe, soprano
The Callithumpian Consort; Jeffrey Means, conductor
Seully Hall, Boston Conservatory
November 11, 2010
Half a century on, a good deal of the fun—and frustration—of hearing Pierre Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître is its inescapable influence: on one level, the piece sounds like a collection of clichés, and then you realize that the reason they’re clichés is because composers have been ripping off the piece for half a century. The sound-world of Le marteau—a pointillistically jumpy, diamond-hard sparkle—became so ingrained in 20th-century new music that it’s easy to forget that somebody had to come up with it first, and that somebody was Boulez, polishing Webern’s fine-spun sparseness to a lethal shine.
Boston Conservatory’s annual compact new-music festival is a mostly-Boulez affair this year, and the first of their four concerts was built around Le marteau, kind of like hanging “Guernica” in the foyer—with no spoonful of tonal sugar to make the serialism go down, it was a chance to hear the music in its own singularly exhilarating light. And Le marteau, once one gets past the déj
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