Incises

Incises#

Incises (“Interpolations”) for solo piano was composed in 1994 as a test piece for the Umberto Micheli Piano Competition, where it was first performed on 21 October 1994. Boulez revised it in 2001. Incises was Boulez’s first work for solo piano since his Third Piano Sonata of 1955–57/63. The piece lasts less than ten minutes. The work plays with contrasts of gestures and textures, for instance, repeated pitches or chords in an even tempo interrupted by violent melodic arcs, or sparse chordal interjections without discernible rhythm over long held sonorities. Reviewing a 2005 performance of Incises, Tim Page described the work thus: “Incises is charged with a bright, cold, hard brilliance, like a spray of crushed ice. It is dense with eventseven when it is silent for a moment, Boulez’s music never really ‘rests’but also far more generous in its emotional expression than much of his earlier work.”

Sur Incises#

Boulez wrote Sur Incises a few years later and dedicated it to Paul Sacher on his 90th birthday. It was premiered on 30 August 1998 by the Ensemble InterContemporain conducted by David Robertson in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall. The piece lasts about forty minutes. It was awarded the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition given by the University of Louisville. Paul Griffiths heard echoes of Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse in Sur Incises, while others have noted its debt to Stravinsky’s Les Noces or Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. Tom Service wrote in The Guardian that: Service described a 2008 performance: “There’s a polish and a voluptuousness about this music that’s instantly appealing and gripping for the whole experience of the piece. A packed Festival Hall gave Boulez a rock-star reception after the music’s coda.” Of the two works, Allan Kozinn preferred Incises, writing: “that work’s Romanticism becomes portentousness in the update, and its sheer virtuosity have given way to abstraction and clockwork precision.”

Further reading#

• Boulez, Pierre. 2001. Incises pour piano (version 2001). Vienna: Universal Edition. UE 31 966.
• Fink, Wolfgang. 2000. Boulez: Sur Incises, programme booklet. Hamburg: Deutsche Grammophon CD 463 475-2.

External links#

• Universal Edition: Incises
• Universal Edition: Sur Incises
• Pierre Boulez: Sur Incises: A Lesson by Pierre Boulez, Medici.tv (in French)
• Listen to Sur Incises on Jiwa