Seniors offer a taut, tangy programme

How fresh is a festival that lets an 85-year-old conduct new work by a 101-year-old? Very, writes MICHAEL DERVAN

THE ALDEBURGH Festival is always interesting for the classical music stereotypes it jettisons. The audience may include a lot of senior citizens (the majority looks to be well on the high side of 50), but the repertoire is anything but conservative. In fact, it’s actually light on the core, 19th-century repertoire that classical promoters rely on so heavily. Aldeburgh doesn’t actually ignore the 19th century, but it pays far more attention to the 20th and 21st centuries and to earlier periods.

Seniors were well to the fore in the programmes of the closing weekend of this year’s festival.

Pierre Boulez, who turned 85 last March, featured as composer and conductor, and one of his tasks on the podium was to conduct the première of What Are Yearsby Elliott Carter, a song cycle for soprano and ensemble, completed on June 1st, 2009, when Carter was 100.

Were there any signs of flagging in either man’s abilities?

Frankly, no. Boulez the conductor is gesturally a minimalist, who has an uncanny knack for using the tiniest of physical movements to the maximum of musical effect. Carter’s songs, setting poems by Marianne Moore, find the composer on vintage form. The writing is often uncompromisingly chunky, and provides as much to chew over as the words.

There's lightness and wit, too, with the fourth song, the very short To an Intra-Mural Rat, provoking chuckles from the audience.

The vocal writing, in an often bravura style, was delivered with repeated brilliance by Claire Booth, and the playing of the Ensemble Intercontemporain under Boulez was taut and tangy.

BOULEZ'S PROGRAMME with the ensemble he founded back in 1976 covered some favourite areas, the pioneering Edgard Varèse (a pungent and piercing reading of his Octandre of 1923), György Ligeti (a susurratingly sensual account of his 1970 Chamber Concerto), and Boulez himself (his Dérive 2, a fluttering swirl of a piece that's somehow almost static – think of the slow progress of a large flight of birds, where the most dynamic motion seems to be internal).

Some of Boulez's earliest pieces were included – the festival's artistic director Pierre-Laurent Aimard conveyed the 1945 Notations for piano in mesmerising colours – and there were also two much later works that use electronics to create a multiplicity of lines with only a single player on the stage, Dialogue de l'ombre double for clarinet(Jérôme Comte) and, even more impressive on this occasion, Anthèmes 2for violin (Jeanne-Marie Conquer).

Boulez is famous – if not notorious – for not letting go of his pieces, for working at them again and again, so that they exist in a dizzying array of versions. A pre-concert conversation with Aimard showed that to be a characteristic of Boulez the man. He would no sooner express an idea than he would begin amending it, to take account of additional perspectives or even counter-arguments as they began to appear to him.

Boulez and Carter are both in their own ways wonders of the age. So, too, is John Eliot Gardiner, who conducted the period instrument musicians of his own Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in Bach’s Mass in B minor. Gardiner has a reputation as a man who is difficult and demanding to work with. And the results he achieved in the Bach were very much those of someone who likes to be in full control and knows exactly how that control can be exerted.

There was a perfection and consistency about Gardiner’s handling of Bach’s music that was simply awe-inspiring. He offered the kind of apparent immediacy between intention and delivery that is usually only found from instrumental virtuosos.

It is, of course, by no means unusual to hear such effects being achieved in the recording studio. In concert, and in a work as long and demanding as the B minor Mass, it’s extremely rare. And with the 32-voice choir also including the line-up of eight soloists, there was an exceptional musical unity of approach that allowed this performance to be both light on its feet and monumental in effect, forceful in expression, yet never forced, steeped in a feeling of fervour yet never, in the manner of a bygone age, religiose.

Performances of Bach rarely sound quite as perfect as this.