David Dalle
Thursday March 27th, 2025 with David Dalle
Pierre Boulez at 100; South African cellist Abel Selaocoe's latest album; Ballaké Sissoko

Pierre Boulez's centenary was yesterday, and this week we will hear one of his greatest compositions, "Pli Selon Pli" (Fold Along Fold). Like many of Boulez's compositions, this was a piece he continued to work on for decades. It began as two improvisations for soprano and percussion ensemble in 1957, and it was not until the 80's that the work found its final form, a five movement composition for soprano and orchestra. The texts are based on five poems by the 19th century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Set in chronological order from his earliest poems to one of his last poems, Boulez also called it a "Portrait de Mallarmé". However, the texts are sung in a very abstract way, very difficult to understand, and the opening and closing movements only use one line from the associated poem. The whole work is a big arc, starting and ending loudly with the same crashing chord and large ensembles with movements two and four for smaller groups and the middle movement only 10 instrumentalists with soprano. Its orchestration is astonishing with an exalted joy of sonorities. The conductor Matthias Pintscher describes it as "thanks to the amazing metallic sounds Boulez uses - harps, percussion, celeste, the most excessive writing for tubular bells that had ever been heard in music history [even more than Mike Oldfield] - he creates an illusion of sustaining, sostenuto sounds." He also writes "In Pli Selon Pli, Boulez takes us by the hand and leads us into this astonishingly beautiful garden and we are free to walk around it in any direction we choose. I love art that allows us to approach it as individuals, which doesn't give us a complete, closed, hermetic message." The Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan writes of Boulez and "Pli Selon Pli": "I loved working with him: he was kind, gentle and so completely about the music. He asked me to sing the title role in Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol with the Berlin Philharmonic in 2010. And, the following year I sung Pli Selon Pli with Boulez conducting, on a European tour that started at the Lucerne festival. It was an honour to stand beside him and sing this 60-minute masterpiece for soprano and orchestra. It was life-changing. I learned about space and time, I learned about complete commitment to every sound, whether mine or my colleague’s, I learned how to take distance, and how to be present." The work has only been recorded three times, all with Pierre Boulez conducting. We will hear his third recording, the only one of the final version, from 2001 with soprano Christine Schäffer and Boulez's Ensemble InterContemporain, expanded to 57 musicians, illustrating the work is really "expanded chamber music" as Boulez described it.