I have no idea if this was a good BaL or not but I found Tom McKinney an excellent guide for a/this listener who is completely ignorant about the music of this sort. Fascinating music.
I think I'm about to get boring of the subject of this BAL so skip this post now if your eyes (ears?) have already glazed over.
1. I think my instincts about Robert Craft (post #16) were shared by Tom. At one point he even said that his precision was better than Pierre's. Such a pity that 1958 recording technology makes Crafts version a poor relation in terms of sound. As Tom mentioned, the balance of instruments varied from movement to movement. In one, the cello and viola were to the fore, whilst in others they were in the background. Strange also to hear a 'dated' style of [excellent] viola playing in an avant garde piece! The Craft was still strongly recommended as a 'period' choice.
2. Tom was the perfect (maybe the only?) choice for a reviewer of Le Marteau. The fact he'd performed it..the guitar part...and his comments about how to aim at but possibly not quite achieve perfection gave him a rare insight into this difficult piece, for instance the 'killer' viola part!
3. He also gave rare insight into Pierre's compositional process and Pierre the man. He was indeed in some sense 'an angry young man' whose driving force was probably disdain for everything that had gone before and everything going on around him including everyone's else's serialism...with the possible exception of Webern's.
4. Tom went beyond the 'serial' aspects of this work, more or less saying tha Boulez rejected the purely procedural. Whilst the soundworld of the 50s avant garde almost inevitably has universal hallmarks (e.g. a huge emphasis on tuned percussion, the flutter-tongued flute about which Tom also commented and the tam-tam) the soundworld of Le Marteau is unmistakably Boulez.
5. Tom's analysis of Pierre's various receded performances was brilliant. How odd that such a dogmatic personality could allow himself such a range of tempo and silences in his 'top brand' piece? Again, Robert's craft better than Pierre's?
6. Now a personal note. Mrs A. and I were enjoying our Saturday morning lie-in, she absorbed in yesterday's Guardian crossword, I in BAL. The words, "Oh God I can't concentrate with that noise" caused me to grab the iphone, fire up Listen Live and plug in the headphones. There was a short period when movement 2 was playing out loud on both FM radio and iphone...but of course several seconds adrift. The effect was WONDERFUL!!!
7. Listening to a work like Le Marteau on headphones gives terrific clarity. I know nothing about the technical side of BAL on BBC i-player, but if anyone's going to listen again, I do recommend headphones.
8. Going back to item 3 above and the subject of serialism, it was a sort of challenge we, as naughty music students, set ourselves to write a note -row and a short piece based on it that was full of lovely thirds and sixths, pleasant melodic intervals and lush harmonies. It's not that easy. But my point is that serialists had their personal harmonic language that went beyond plonking down 12 chromatic notes in any old order. It was pointed out (by someone, somewhere) that Stravinsky's later serial pieces still sounded like...Stravinsky. Same applies to Boulez?
9. One can only boggle at the various vocalists' skill. OK Yvonne Minton seemed to come out tops, but even the one who had a slight thumbs down early on seemed pretty darn good to me.
10. OK. I've finished.
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