Olga Neuwirth: twin Tombeau tributes to Boulez in Paris and London
Olga Neuwirth’s Tombeau I is premiered in Paris on 8 February as part of her composer feature at Radio France’s Festival Présences, while Tombeau II: Hommage à Pierre Boulez gains its first performance on 26 January from the London Symphony Orchestra within a Boulez centenary feature.
Composer Olga Neuwirth joins celebrations of Pierre Boulez’s centenary this year with two new orchestral tributes premiered over the coming months in London and Paris. In a recent interview in The Guardian about the pioneering French composer and conductor Neuwirth described how “he was a man of vast reading, a fast thinker, a curious cosmopolitan as well as a learned diplomat, who taught me, and us all, to listen. I hope his music is being played in 100 years’ time. Ars longa, vita brevis.”
Neuwirth's Tombeau II: Hommage à Pierre Boulez is premiered on 26 January by the London Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Maxime Pascal at the Barbican Hall in London. Neuwirth's new piece is the first of three world premieres in this concert, interpolated between the parts of Debussy's Images pour orchestre and Boulez's Notations for orchestra, looking both forwards and backwards. The new work was jointly commissioned by the LSO, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra with further performances in Munich and Stockholm to be announced.
Olga Neuwirth states that Tombeau II “is intended as an ‘homage’ to Boulez but also refers to the principle of musical metamorphosis, the reworking for a different line-up of instrumental forces, just as Boulez did with some of his Notations piano pieces. I was asked to look at Boulez's Notations IX, entitled Lontain-Calme, a piano piece which was not orchestrated by Boulez… I left the original of Notations IX largely untouched as the basis for my Tombeau, but stretched Boulez's musical score by a certain factor in terms of time. The stretched piano piece served as a seed to grow, thanks to the possibilities of the orchestral apparatus, through augmentation of the rhythmic and figurative elements to almost sustained notes, thus creating a kind of layering - an echo of the original work.”
Tombeau II layers the forces of a large, differentiated orchestra over the course of around six minutes; the piece unfolds at an extremely slow tempo, with horizontal sounds at a predominantly subdued volume, building with a slow and huge crescendo which refers to Boulez’s engagement with Wagner’s music “when he conducted Der Ring des Nibelungen in 1976 in Patrice Chéreau's production. The sensual effect of Wagner's music often evokes a kind of delirium. And I think that impressed and influenced Boulez. So did the idea of transcending the boundaries of space and time. As it says in Parsifal: "Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit" (‘Time here becomes space’).”
The first piece in Neuwirth’s series of homages is also conceived as a tribute to Pierre Boulez: Tombeau I was commissioned by Radio France, IRCAM with the support of the Pierre Boulez Foundation, WDR Cologne and the Lucerne Festival. The world premiere of the work for large orchestra and electronics will take place in Paris on 8 February as part of Présences - the festival for new music organised by Radio France which is featuring a composer portrait of Olga Neuwirth in its 2025 programme. Other highlights in Paris include Neuwirth’s two solo concertos locus...doublure...solus (with pianist Tamara Stefanovich) and ...miramondo multiplo... (with trumpeter David Guerrier), both with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France under the direction of André de Ridder and Matthias Pintscher on 7 and 9 February respectively.
> Visit the Festival Présences website
Further performances of Neuwirth's Tombeau I will take place on 9 March in the Cologne Philharmonie with the WDR Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jonathan Nott and on 7 September with the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) conducted by Elena Schwarz in the concert hall of the Culture and Congress Centre Lucerne.
Among Neuwirth’s recent compositions, her orchestral score Dreydl continues to spin widely, with 15 performances programmed since its premiere in 2022. The 12-minute score is performed in Berlin on 15 January with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester under Anna Skryleva as part of the Festival Ultraschall and the BBC Philharmonic presents Dreydl’s UK premiere at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester on 8 March under the baton of Anja Bihlmaier. Neuwirth explains how “the continuous rhythmic patterns in Dreydl are used to underline the fatal circularity of destiny such as we have experienced during the two years of the pandemic — where time has been suspended and nobody knows what the future will bring.”
> Further information on Work: Tombeau II. Hommage à Pierre Boulez
Photo: Rui Camilo