Above: the players of Ensemble Interconterporain
Author: Shoshana W. Klein
Saturday March 25th, 2023 - If you're a contemporary music performer or aficionado, chances are you've come across the Ensemble Intercontemporain - they are one of the quintessential contemporary music ensembles and they have a ton of recordings and videos on YouTube. The ensemble was created by Pierre Boulez in 1976, and I’d say that makes it one of the oldest of its kind, but in a lot of ways it’s actually still one of the only of its kind. The members are full-time, and while they’re based in Paris, the group’s performances are mostly on tour all over. Despite groups like Alarm Will Sound, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and others, the US certainly doesn’t have an analogous ensemble - all those that come to mind are different instrumentation, different focus, and certainly not full-time for 31 members. Of course, that’s probably partially due to funding structure differences - Ensemble Intercontemporain is funded by the French government as well as by touring. The ensemble defines contemporary as 20th and 21st century pieces - though surely not all 20th century work, remembering that Rachmaninoff and Respighi were composing far into the 20th century that this group certainly wouldn’t consider in their wheelhouse.
The concert started with Arnold Schoenberg's 5 Pieces arranged for this size ensemble. The short, extremely lyrical, and fully engaging movements were a good start to a concert in which the other two pieces were 45 minutes each. The ensemble works incredibly well together - I felt that particularly the woodwinds had a huge range of timbres and dynamics.
Next was Matthias Pintscher’s sonic eclipse, a kind of double concerto. The premise is very interesting, in which the first and second movements are each “celestial bodies” and the third is called “occultation” and describes the eclipse. The first movement has a trumpet soloist (Clément Saunier), the second a horn soloist (Jean-Christophe Vervoitte), and both in the third. While I’m not sure I heard the intended sonic eclipse, I was able to appreciate a lot of the sonic textures - the timbral flexibility of all of the players combined with the writing meant that I often could barely tell where a sound was coming from - they were able to match each others’ sounds so well. At one point the string tremolo was matching the trumpet soloist flutter tongue in a way that I would not have thought possible beforehand.
Above: Pierre Boulez
The last piece - Boulez’s Dérive 2 - had such a sustained energy throughout the 45 minutes that it made me think again about how many ensembles and how many players in the world can play this music, not to mention exceptionally. It’s not played live often, understandably.
This program was very much the ensemble's traditional repertoire - significant pieces by their founder, current music director (Pintscher, also conducting), and Schoenberg. There's definitely something to be said about a contemporary ensemble that has such a canon of its own - is it a little bit of a contradiction? Or a difference in defining "contemporary"? It might be worth noting that while they have plenty of newer members - much of the ensemble seemed on the younger side - the group of around 20 people performing seemed to have three women, and of the full 31 members listed on the website, I saw five.
Despite the difficulty of the whole concert, the ensemble consistently seemed to be enjoying themselves, as did the audience - the almost full house called Pintscher back on stage something like 5 times with a long standing ovation.
~ Shoshana W. Klein