Excellent Wigmore Hall concert for Boulez’s centenary year by Sean Shibe and friends

United Kingdom Dillon, Miller, and Boulez: Sean Shibe (guitar), Ema Nikolovska (mezzo-soprano), Adam Walker (flute), George Barton, Iris van den Bos, Sam Wilson (percussion), Emma Wernig (viola), Matthew Hunt (clarinet), Mira Benjamin (violin), Colin Alexander (cello) / Alphonse Cemin (conductor). Wigmore Hall, 29.5.2025. (MB)

James Dillon – 12 Caprices (world premiere)
Cassandra Miller – Bel Canto
Boulez – Le Marteau sans maître

In this excellent Wigmore Hall concert for Boulez’s centenary year, Sean Shibe and friends, mezzo-soprano Ema Nikolovska first among equals, demonstrated once again the stature, challenge, and thrills of what arguably remains the composer’s signature work, Le Marteau sans maître. ‘Without feeling close to Boulez’s music,’ Stravinsky wrote to Nadia Boulanger in 1957, ‘I frankly find it preferable to many things of his generation.’ And we can certainly tend to think of it – almost unavoidably – in terms of music and musicians that had led up to it. Take its Asia-tilted percussion, strongly recalling Messiaen’s Trois petites liturgies (for which Boulez turned vibraphone pages at the 1945 premiere), here magically brought to life by George Barton, Iris van den Bos, and Sam Wilson; the crossing and continuation of lines between instruments, immediately apparent here in the first of the work’s nine movements, inevitably reminiscent of Webern, the serialist ‘threshold’; or the mesmerising, even Mozartian ravishment of the third ‘Commentaire’ on ‘Bourreaux de solitude’. (In the latter case, I am sure Così fan tutte did not actually play a role here, but I like to fancy that the older Boulez, recording that extraordinary, unexpected Ensemble Intercontemporain performance of the Serenade, KV 361/370a, alongside Berg’s Chamber Concerto, might nonetheless have subsumed it into his aesthetic realm.) Here, though, we looked, or rather listened, forward, if retrospectively, the first half presenting the world premiere of James Dillon’s 12 Caprices for solo guitar and Cassandra Miller’s 2010 Maria Callas homage, Bel Canto.

Not having heard Le Marteau for a while (my most recent live encounter might actually have been eight years ago in Vienna) I experienced the joy of rediscovery, but also of that increasing sense in Boulez’s œuvre more widely of taking a place in the great modernist ‘museum’ to which he felt such ambivalent attraction. This is not ‘pointillist’ music, far from it, but using that as a starting point for exploration, not least that connection of instrumental and vocal lines mentioned above, seemed fitting or at least not entirely absurd in the progress of this performance and the material on which it is founded. ‘Avant “L’Artisanat furieux”’ felt that way, anyway, its archetypal ‘exquisite labyrinth’ becoming ever more involved, conductor Alphonse Cemin and the ensemble equally ensuring there was no loss to visceral experience, no smoothing of the edges. Rhythm, as in Stravinsky, continued to drive. In similar spirit, flute and voice melismata (Adam Walker and Nikolovska) almost yet not quite combined in ‘L’Artisanat furieux’. As Boulez’s serial universe thereafter unfolded, an angrier presentiment perhaps of Pli selon pli, development seemed to occur as much retrospectively as in ‘order’. Relaxation had something splendidly disorienting to it, as if swimming uphill in waters unknown. Process in all its volatility could be felt, even if one could not – should not – put it into words. Throughout, one felt wholehearted commitment from the musicians: not only sure and knowing, but vividly exploratory guides to our ears. An invisible theatre, especially apparent in the two closing movements, welcomed to its stage ghosts from the past: a Pierrot-like line on Emma Wernig’s viola, or Debussyan arabesque upon arabesque incited and invited by Walker’s flute. This was above all music for now, resisting the museum even as it entered in.

Dillon’s 12 Caprices put me in mind, perhaps coincidentally, but the coincidence was strong, of Boulez’s own piano Notations, similarly aphoristic and twelve in number. Perhaps it was only this context that led me to think that way, but gesture and substance in the very first seemed to come from a related soundworld and mind. They then pursued their own path, of course, offering plentiful space for finely wrought, idiomatic guitar-writing and committed performance. Each of the caprices laid claim both to individual character in kaleidoscopic variety, and also to a strong sense of progression within the whole. Work and performance alike drew one in, in spellbinding fashion. Quoted in the programme as speaking of ‘a framing of the fugitive’, Dillon brought that Lorca-founded image to spellbinding if swiftly vanishing life, with outstanding advocacy from Shibe.

In Bel Canto, Nikolovska and two mini-ensembles, one with her onstage, the other behind and above in the balcony, brought to life not only Callas’s ‘Vissi d’arte’, but the passage of time in her career: ‘not only’, in Miller’s words, ‘about the ageing of an extraordinary woman, but also about the listener. Time slows down to allow for an engagement with detail, for a submersion in the sound, and for meditative stillness.’ That is very much what we experienced, time slowing, even near-repeating, as if a record were stuck; and yet, it moved. There was something dream-like, even epiphanic to Nikolovska and the instrumentalists’ revelation, yet whatever one might have felt, there was nothing vague to it, their means as precise as, say, Berio’s layering in his Folk Songs or, indeed, Sinfonia, be they written or left to the performers’ judgement. The midway surprise of an unseen Romantic violin solo from behind (Mira Benjamin), vying in richness with Nikolovska’s voice, ever changing yet ever the same, registered as an invisible coup de théâtre, a prelude to sounds hitherto unimagined yet making perfect sense when they came. Not entirely unlike Le Marteau, one might say, although unmistakeably of the Mediterranean.

Mark Berry