It’s 40 years since Pierre Boulez established the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and what was originally set up as the performing arm of IRCAM, the musical research institute that he had created beneath the Pompidou Centre in Paris, was quickly recognised as one of the leading new-music groups in the world.
From the outset, the EIC was never a chamber orchestra with a fixed membership, but more a flexible pool of instrumental soloists who could be called on when required. So for the group’s Wigmore appearance there were four players, the pianists Dimitri Vassilakis and Sébastien Vichard, and the percussionists Gilles Durot and Samuel Favre. The programme too was one that Boulez himself might have planned – modernist masterpieces by Debussy and Bartók framed the world premiere of a specially commissioned work.
The novelty came from Aurélio Edler-Copes, a new name to me, who was born in Brazil in 1976 but studied at IRCAM and is now based in France. His 15-minute piece for two pianos and percussion, Presence, borrows some of its musical processes from sound recording and the way in which tape is manipulated. The two movements, Nowhere and Everywhere – the first explosive and discursive, the second much more static – are full of tightly packed musical mirrors and symmetries, which may accumulate into frantic textures, or unravel into lingering, decaying echoes. It’s attractive, vividly heard music that’s never dull for a moment.
It certainly held its own alongside Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, which the EIC players tore into with tremendous confidence and elan, making light of its technical challenges just as Vassilakis and Vichard did without their percussion colleagues in a group of two-piano arrangements of pieces from Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, and Debussy’s En Blanc et Noir. Perhaps some of Debussy’s textures could have been a little leaner and crystalline than they seemed on the Wigmore’s magnificent pair of Steinways, but the performance had such authority that hardly mattered.
