Latest news with #EnsembleIntercontemporain
The Guardian
24-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ensemble Intercontemporain/Bleuse review – from a clown to a clarinet and Cathy Berberian
Twin titans of the 20th-century avant garde, Luciano Berio and Pierre Boulez were born seven months apart in 1925. This well-crafted concert by Ensemble Intercontemporain, the orchestra Boulez founded in 1976, avoided the obvious hits while demonstrating just how different their music could be. Berio's Sequenza V for solo trombone is one of 14 pieces he wrote to test the boundaries of particular instruments or vocal types. It was inspired by Grock, a Swiss-born clown and one-time neighbour of the composer, whose personality had fascinated him as a boy. Lucas Ounissi, ambling on in full circus slap and a lime-green wig, put his instrument through its paces. Juggling a handheld plunger mute, he rasped and farted away, frequently singing and playing at the same time. A virtuoso performance showed off the breadth of the composer's imagination as well as his singular sense of humour. The more sober-minded Boulez was represented by his Dialogue de l'ombre double (Dialogue of the Double Shadow). Written to celebrate Berio's 60th birthday, it pits an on-stage clarinettist against his pre-recorded doppelganger, the latter electronically manipulated in real time and piped into the auditorium through speakers. The versatile Jérôme Comte hot-desked from one music stand to another, taking melismatic licks and frenetic outbursts in his stride. Rock-solid technique and calm deliberation brought clarity and purpose to Boulez's intricate demands. The pre-record, meanwhile, bounced off the walls and ceiling of the Royal Albert Hall in a mesmerising wash of surround sound. The grand finale was Berio's Recital I (For Cathy), a piece the composer wrote in 1972 for his former wife Cathy Berberian. The conceit is theatrical: an operatic diva shows up for a recital only to find her accompanist isn't there. An ensemble of 17 takes up the cause, with the singer descending into madness as she tosses off scatter-gun quotes from vocal works of the past. Berberian's visceral account, captured on record, was a tour de force. Sarah Aristidou certainly acted a good fight, with conductor Pierre Bleuse gamely adding his dramatic six penn'orth, but the spoken text was barely audible, rendering the work more gnomic than usual. Listen again on BBC Sounds until 12 October. The Proms continue until 13 September.
The Guardian
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Cassie Kinoshi x Ensemble intercontemporain review – vivid and anarchic, new music programme full of thrills
Perhaps it was anniversary fatigue, or perhaps it was half-term. Either way, the latest instalment of the Barbican's celebrations for the centenary of 20th-century musical giant Pierre Boulez featuring Ensemble intercontemporain (his own crack team for new music) drew only a paltry audience. The man himself was dismissive of such difficulties: 'You always find 200 fanatics,' he once observed. 'What is important is to increase the number.' (Composer, conductor, visionary – but Boulez was no PR maven.) The fanatics, at least, were there – though they hadn't come for Boulez himself, if the polite response to a thrillingly anarchic performance of his Sur Incises after the interval was anything to go by. Under rising-star conductor Nicolò Umberto Foron, its moments of freefall reverberation were a delicious release from the ultra-precise rhythmic flurries of three pianos, thunderous in their lower register. Instead, it was the first half that generated excitement: a taut, intensely focused performance of shouting forever into the receiver, for which British composer Hannah Kendall won an Ivor Novello award in 2023, followed by the world premiere of composer, saxophonist and bandleader Cassie Kinoshi's [Untitled]. Kendall's piece is a haunting exploration of Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo's concept of the 'Plantation Machine'. Much of the finely textured score functions as pitched white noise around crackly walkie-talkie speech in French and English. At its most memorable moment, the orchestral instruments fall silent, leaving only music boxes cranking out extracts of classical hits and harmonicas producing vivid note-clusters on every exhalation like an ethereal musical life-support machine. Kinoshi's [Untitled] was a noisier, funkier affair, incorporating virtuosic live turntabling by NikNak, whose whirlwind scratches cut deeply across the orchestra's dense textures, as well as video by French artist Julien Creuzet and solo choreography from tyroneisaacstuart. Musically, it was exquisitely paced. Momentum gathered through the hefty bass of lower strings, fiendish trumpet curlicues were picked up by a cello screaming high up the fingerboard and two flutes combined in a moreish, barline-defying groove. At the heady climax, the orchestra was suddenly cut, leaving only a symphony of squelches, echoes and loops from the turntable, spinning out overhead.
