Edgard Varèse - BBC Total Immersion Day 6th May 2017

[Beef Oven!]

I really enjoyed the film - hadn’t seen it before.

Chailly explaining the humour in EV’s music was wonderful.

[Bryn]

Monday's R3iC listing claims that the arrangement of Étude pour Éspace received its UK premier at the Total Immersion day. Strange! I understood it to have been performed at the Varèse 360 event at the South Bank complex 7 years ago. I was somewhat put out that it was not included in the selective broadcast from that celebration.

[Bryn]

Monday's R3iC listing claims that the arrangement of Étude pour Éspace received its UK premier at the Total Immersion day. Strange! I understood it to have been performed at the Varèse 360 event at the South Bank complex 7 years ago. I was somewhat put out that it was not included in the selective broadcast from that celebration.

The claim was repeated tonight. How can they be unaware of this?

Sunday, 18 April 2010
Varèse 360° (1) - London Sinfonietta/Atherton, 16 April 2010
Queen Elizabeth Hall

Varèse – Ionisation, for thirteen percussionists
Varèse – Density 21.5, for solo flute
Varèse-Chou Wen-chung – Dance for Burgess, fragment for chamber orchestra
Varèse – Ecuatorial, for bass and ensemble
Varèse-Chou Wen-chung – Etude pour Espace
Varèse – Déserts, for wind, piano, percussion, and tape

London Sinfonietta
David Atherton (conductor)
Cathie Boyd (staging, director, video, lighting)
Sir John Tomlinson (bass)
EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble
Jonathan Golove, Natasha Farny (cello theremin)
Sound Intermedia
Pippa Nissen (video)
Zerlina Hughes (lighting)
Dan Ayling (stage manager)

Damn it. Martin Handley misled re. Déserts too. The tape interludes used for the concert broadcast tonight were not the Paris ones but those made much later at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, which ore quite different. It does not take much homework to get such matters right.

[Beef Oven!]

I've been listening to the Gielen/SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg, and I'm finding it quite a revelation. The revealing thing I'm picking up on from comparison with the other (mainly excellent) available performances concerns rhythm. It's not just that the pulse feels quicker, there's something ineffably 'right' about how Gielen moves through this music (I regret that I can't put it across on a technical level).

Comparing it with the Chailly/Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra performance (which is the one I've kinda been doing an A/B comparison with it), it's interesting to me how RC gets more light and shade into the music. There seems to my ears to be more timbral and textural contrast. However, although this sort of thing is what the piece is supposed to be all about, I find that it all snaps into wonderful focus when the rhythmic aspect of the music is perfected. The Gielen performance, IMVHO, does that.

I won't list them out, but many of the other versions are rhythmically clunky. Btw, my hero, Pierre Boulez ruins this work, IMVHO.

Gonna listen to this work often this week.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Saving up for that Gielen box - and from your and Richard's comments elsewhere, it's incredibly frustrating that Gielen didn't record more Varese than this Arcana.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gielen-Vol-Various-Swr-Classic/dp/B07BN7Q2KQ

I share your disappointment in Boulez's recordings of Varese - particularly the works for large orchestra. In the late '70s, that NYPO LP was about the only recording easily available, and I was assured that it would become a "collectors' item" in years to come. It put me off those works for years, and it was only after hearing Abravanel's Ameriques in the early '90s that I realized that this was a tremendous work. Chailly's two-disc set really provided the conviction in the playing and in my listening that these were amongst the most exciting and overwhelming pieces of Music ever imagined.