George Benjamin spent six weeks of the summer of 1984 working
at Pierre Boulez’s famous musical research centre in Paris,
IRCAM. Stephen Walsh’s excellent notes tell us that each evening,
as he emerged into the outside world, Benjamin passed a group
of Peruvian street musicians, and was fascinated by the sound
of their panpipes. A year later he returned and, using the powerful
computer facilities available at IRCAM, synthesised the sound
of panpipes to allow the virtual instrument to be played from
a digital keyboard. The acoustic instrument’s limitations –a
limited number of notes available, held notes impossible and
so on – were thus eradicated. The fruit of this labour was Antara
– the Inca word for panpipes – scored for two keyboards, two
flutes (doubling piccolo), two trombones, two percussionists
and eight string players. As always with Benjamin one wonders
how he manages to conjure up such a range of sound from so unpromising
an ensemble. Also typical of him are the moments of near stasis
and near-inaudibility. The synthesised panpipe sounds are unmistakeable,
but the listener is not transported to South America by this
remarkable work. It is music very much of its time, with little
conventional melodic or harmonic development, but even those
allergic to contemporary musical techniques will find this,
I think, an easy listen, and perhaps one of the best points
to start an exploration of this most fascinating and rewarding
composer.
The programme continues with two short works by Pierre Boulez.
In this case even Stephen Walsh’s eloquent prose is inadequate
to convey clearly the compositional processes behind these two
pieces. Whether one chooses to understand them – or try to understand
them – or not, the music itself is pretty much what those already
exposed to Boulez will expect: meticulous attention to sound,
often ravishingly beautiful, but with few audible signposts
and nothing much in the way of conventional forward movement.
Mémoriale, composed in memory of the flutist Lawrence
Beauregard, is a fully notated version of one movement from
…explosante-fixe …, an earlier work which had featured
aleatoric techniques. Dérive is a work in two parts,
clearly signalled by Stephen Walsh and gratifyingly audible
in performance, the first a series of chords, the second allowing
rather extended melodic lines to flower. In both works the musical
material is subjected to Boulez’s highly personal and extended
serial technique, but a wry smile is probably a fair reaction
to the explanation of how the composer used the name ‘Sacher’
as a basis for his musical material. The problem I have always
had with the music of Pierre Boulez – though not with Boulez
the conductor – is the almost total absence of human sensibility,
despite the surface beauty. To describe the music as cold or
arid is inadequate: in fact, the human being seems simply absent.
This is pretty much the case here, though there are tantalising
glimpses in the closing moments of both pieces.
There is no electronic element in Jonathan Harvey’s Song
Offerings, despite the composer’s IRCAM experience. It is
a fully notated, short song-cycle for soprano and eight-piece
instrumental ensemble. The words are four love poems by Tagore,
sung in the poet’s own English translation. In the first, the
singer awaits her lover, breathlessly, excitedly trying to fend
off sleep. The second, a rapid, scherzo-like piece, deals with
light and dancing. The third song deals in oblique detail with
the relation between earthly and heavenly love, whilst death
is the surprisingly welcome wedding guest in the final song.
Throughout this short cycle there are moments of remarkable
beauty. The scoring of the first song, and the illustration
of the word “sleep” are two such moments, and the closing passage
of the third song, where the words invoke the notion of “perfect
union” is as beautiful a confection as you will hear anywhere
in modern music. The close of the cycle, too, is a magnificent
piece of aural imagination, and profoundly moving; my only disappointment
is that the composer, rather in step with the times, has the
singer speak a few lines in this song: ineffective and unnecessary.
Song Offerings is, in my opinion, a small masterpiece,
but the work’s difficulty, plus its unconventional forces will
mean that live performances are bound to be rare. Buy this disc,
then; it is worth the expense for this work alone. No praise
is too high for Penelope Walmsley-Clark, whose beautiful voice
soars and leaps in step with the fiendishly difficult, yet superbly
conceived, vocal line the composer has given her. The words
are printed in the booklet, which also features a list of participating
instrumentalists. This is an interesting roll-call: one of the
keyboards in Antara, for example, is played by Pierre-Laurent
Aimard, and the list of viola players includes one Sally Beamish.
Music-making of this quality is not to be found every day, and
the composers will surely have been profoundly grateful to these
players for the confidence and extraordinary skill they brought
to these performances.
William Hedley
Penelope Walmsley-Clark (soprano) 
