The QEH is a 900-seater with reasonable rake up the rows. The stage is fairly narrow
and these look like acoustic treatment panels
as these
look like speakers. As you can see from the stage photograph (click to enlarge) there were mics all over everyone. So I'm not sure if they were recording, or if were really hearing the PA rather than the live instruments. It felt like we were hearing the live instruments.
The band was the London Sinfonietta. This is a long-established, well-respected crew that specialises in contemporary music. Most of the players have quality careers and academic positions.
The last piece was Thallein, which was written for the Sinfonietta.
It so happens I have a recording of Thallein. (Doesn't everyone?) Boulez, Ensemble Contemporian, 2007. I tried to listen at comparable volume levels, without scaring the neighbours.
Boulez' interpretation has a lighter touch, a better sense of pace, and brings out the tunefulness and rhythm of some of the phrases. It might have been a different piece of music.
The recording / mixing / mastering engineers on Boulez' session knew what they were doing. Placement and separation of instruments. Clarity. Neither the percussion nor the piano over-whelmed, even when it was required to be loud. On stage the percussion was in the centre and overwhelmed everyone when it hammered forth. On the recording, it's on the right speaker: it's loud, but it's localised. On stage the piano was on the left, as it is in the recording, but on the recording it's one instrument out of many, whereas on stage it was the instrument when it had a part.
The CD + Hi-fi win this one.
Now let's talk briefly about post-war avant-garde music. Most of it was produced by academics or composers with generous government grants. It was deliberately written to be hard on the ear - lest any moment of it sound like Mozart or Wagner. It has many instruments playing different notes at the same time, but they are not playing a chord (not even a C dim flat 4 sus 5 add minor 11), as the intention is to make a LOUD NOISE rather than even a wonky harmony. It is very easy to interpret this music in this way, and played like that, it is barely listenable. That's why Boulez' recording is such an eye-opener.
Had the Sinfonietta's interpretation picked out the strands in the music more clearly, turned down an f in the forte-s, and found reason to be delicate at times, as well as to insist on some rhythmic structure to the phrases that might support it, well, it still would have been Xenakis, but much better-tempered. He started as an architect: architects do rhythm and elegance and nice little surprises - even the Brutalists - why would he change when writing music?
Which brings me to ticket prices. I was sitting down front, in the sweet spot, and it cost £30. For just over an hour. On Amazon the Boulez 2-CD is £8.84 with free Prime delivery. It's available on Qobuz. When I go to a live concert, I'm not paying to hear the music: I can do that almost for free at home. I'm paying for the quality of the interpretation by conductors and instrumentalists, nearly all of whom are very smart people with degrees and years of playing experience and scholarship behind them. I want them to let me hear something I haven't heard from anyone else before, that makes me go home and listen again to what I have.
For that £30 would be cheap. Without that, it's too much.
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