LSO/ BOULEZ , Barbican Hall, London
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Your support makes all the difference.Achille-Claude Debussy and Pierre Boulez have much in common. Boulez, back at the Barbican to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra in six concerts of 20th-century masterworks, starting with Debussy, rarely minces words. Like Boulez, Debussy often exploded in print, savaging insipid contemporaries. He laboured at a new musical aesthetic, and sensed it to be all but divinely vouchsafed. What resulted became a paradigm of textural lucidity. So too with Boulez. You could encapsulate their joint achievement with a word Messiaen, a bridge between the two, was fond of; clarté.
To bring out clarté in as sumptuous a work as Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien is some achievement. Debussy composed it in 1911 as Stravinsky stormed Paris with Petrushka and a year before the Ballet Russes performed Prélude à L'Après-midi d'un faune. Ida Rubinstein, with whom the poet Gabriele d'Annunzio collaborated on Sébastien, was a sensual, quirky Isadora Duncan precursor whose antics – D'Annunzio conflates the Christ story with a pre-Christian "dying God" myth, here that of Adonis – were unlikely to commend themselves to Paris bourgeoisie.
For all his distaste for D'Annunzio's indulgence, Debussy fell for this syncretic tale: the score is one of his most beautiful. Boulez didn't catch it all: crisp, unsentimental pacing led the narrator, the actor Thibault de Montalembert, to garble even unaccompanied. This was apt for the "vision of holy combat", but unhelpful to some words that passed unsavoured. Happily he found perfect pacing for "Voyez, Son corps ensanglanté".
The LSO's playing was rich and sensual, but the longed-for lucidity surfaced only in the third section (superb chorus sopranos for "Weep for Adonis"), with Sally Matthews's melting lovely "Le monde est rouge de mon tourment", plus pianissimo clarinet duo. The most alluring movement, the Pelléas-like fourth, was ravishing.
Boulez was spellbinding earlier with Prélude à L'Après-midi d'un faune, nursing forth those elements that support and shadow the flute: clarinet at the start, parodying oboe, paired violins. Clarinets also launch George Benjamin's Palimpsest I and II, the first composed for Boulez's 75th, the second heard first at this concert – a bevy of clarinets in a moody, intricate near-chorale that continues below the marimba-etched surface. Benjamin, too, aspires to lucidity; it was there. This was an evening not of two masterworks, but four.
Boulez at the Barbican, to 17 October (020-7628 2326)
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