London Symphony Orchestra, Barbican, London - review

Pierre Boulez's health sadly is not strong enough for him to visit the UK for the events marking his 90th birthday. There are a lot of them: the Barbican's "Boulez at 90" series, the Aldeburgh Festival and dedicated events at this summer's BBC Proms - enough to see him well on the way to his 91st.

Maybe he would have conducted this concert with the London Symphony Orchestra if he had been well enough. Instead, Hungarian composer Peter Eotvos took his place in a programme that began and ended with works by Boulez, though so different that it would be hard to spot they came from the same pen.

The dense Livre pour cordes stands in the shadow of the string orchestra pieces of Schoenberg and Webern. It is no doubt meticulously organised, though the listener is pushed to hear how, and the LSO strings sounded tested by its intricate, seemingly random detail.

For the centrepiece, Eotvos conducted a Boulez regular: Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. This was a sharply etched, clean performance much in Boulez's fastidiously accurate mould (Stravinsky lived to review Boulez's recording of the work and rather gleefully managed to point out a few errors). Salient features - the piercing E flat clarinet, ringing trumpets, attacking rhythms - gave Eotvos's Rite an exciting edge. It was all very different from the LSO's last performance, mysterious, pagan pre-history, under Simon Rattle.

The Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna hardly sounds like Boulez at all. Eight groups of players, mostly wind and brass with drums, are arranged on the stage. Some of the players barely have anything to do and passing amusement can be had from trying to spot when they pick up their instruments. The music has a ceremonial feel to it, as if in a funeral procession. Tam-tams toll like church bells; the wind and brass choirs create static blocks of sound like imposing, ageless masonry. Insofar as there is any movement at all, it is a slow, methodical tread. Eotvos and the LSO players gave it a distinguished and lucid authority - a downbeat end to any concert, but what could follow it?

barbican.org.uk

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