Proms on Afternoon Concert 8 (05.08.20): BBC SO - Varèse, Boulez, Stravinsky

[bluestateprommer]

"Penny Gore presents great BBC Prom concerts from recent years by BBC orchestras and choirs: today Pierre Boulez conducts his own music plus works by Varèse and Stravinsky - the original version of his ballet Petrushka - in a Prom given in 2002.

Varèse: Intégrales
Boulez:
(a) Le visage nuptial
(b) Le soleil des eaux
Stravinsky: Petrushka (1911 version)

Francoise Pollet (soprano)
Susan Parry (mezzo-soprano)
BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Conductor: Pierre Boulez"

BBC R3 programme page: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000lgrq

[Serial_Apologist]

The two Boulez cantatas offer an accessible entrée to the composer's early music, and are well worth hearing, even if for that reason alone.

[Pulcinella]

I wonder if Boulez had a preference for the original 1911 Petrushka: both his NYPO (Sony) and Cleveland (DG) recordings are of that version.

[Bryn]

I wonder if Boulez had a preference for the original 1911 Petrushka: both his NYPO (Sony) and Cleveland (DG) recordings are of that version.

Indeed he did, and I concur.

[bluestateprommer]

I wonder if Boulez had a preference for the original 1911 Petrushka: both his NYPO (Sony) and Cleveland (DG) recordings are of that version.

The presentation has archival audio of Boulez speaking at the beginning about Varèse, and just before Petrushka about Stravinsky, where in the latter, Boulez indeed expresses his preferences for earlier Stravinsky works. Implicitly, that would align with his preference for the 1911 original version of Petrushka.

Finally caught up with this Afternoon Concert relay of this past Prom (BTW, just so you're warned, the Afternoon Concert Proms rebroadcasts are on the standard 30-day limit after relay, while the evening selections have a longer availability time after the initial relay, up to 2 months, if I have that correct). Per Bryn's comment, I'd never heard either of the Boulez works in any form before, so those two works alone made this one of great interest. From hearing them, especially Le visage nuptial, I had a similar reaction to other Boulez works that I've heard, from the Proms and elsewhere, which is hard to describe: namely, I get a sense of the whole being less than the sum of its parts, and the parts kind of sound same-y after a while. This was less of an issue with Le soleil des eaux, where the more violent passages were indeed more of a contrast.

BTW, I've put in external links in the 1st post to the French texts. Then you can paste the texts into an on-line translator to be able to follow them, which I definitely needed, even though I got lost particularly in the title movement of Le visage nuptial. That work especially has a large quotient of text, and Boulez sets it all. Also, as an FYI, for the link to the text of Le soleil des eaux, in the 1st section, the sub-sections that start "Il est midi chardonneret." and "L'écho de ce pays......" in the on-line text actually occur in flipped order in performance, with the "L'écho de ce pays......" part occurring first.

This performance of Petrushka actually had its very modest share of near-clams (e.g. the trumpet of Petrushka's ghost near the end), and also a strange undefined sound just after the very final chord, before the applause. I had to replay that end just to be sure that it wasn't some strange noise here. The Varèse went well, very much in keeping with the other Varèse selections included on the various Proms rebroadcasts. In fact, that's a sly point, that in addition to much of the same old repertoire, there are little touches like 4 Varèse works tucked into the choices. (Trust me: this would not go over well at all with any of the very few classical radio stations that remain on this side of the pond.)

So even though I had some modest issues with this re-broadcast, it's definitely worth a listen, and I was very glad to have heard it, for the first time.