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.
