Magiciens du son
PROGRAMME NOTES
written by JASPER CROONEN
Claude Debussy Pelléas et Mélisande, Suite symphonique (arr.) (1898)
Philippe Boesmans Fin de nuit pour piano et orchestre (2017)
Richard Wagner Tristan und Isolde, WWV 90, Vorspiel und Liebestod (1859)
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14.03.2026 FLAGEY BRUSSELS
A tribute to three “magicians of sound” who, each in their own era, pushed the boundaries of orchestration to create worlds of unparalleled richness, clarity — or mystery.
Wagner + Debussy + ... = Boesmans
‘He was a kind of musical mille-feuille’
When Philippe Boesmans died in April 2022 after a short illness, it was La Monnaie that organised his musical farewell. Hardly surprising. Boesmans, who lived to be eighty-five, had been composer-in-residence there for many years and made his name above all with his operas. He wrote eight in total (plus a reworking of Monteverdi’s L'incoronazione di Poppea). All of them were performed in Brussels, and the majority even received their world premiere there.
Yet Boesmans was by no means confined to the stage. Alongside his operatic output, he left a limited but no less remarkable body of non-theatrical works. His piece for the unusual combination of horn and voice, Upon La-Mi, already earned him the Prix Italia in 1971. His song cycle Trakl-Lieder (1988) also met with swift success and was recorded, together with his First String Quartet, in the nineteen nineties and released on CD.
fin de nuit
Fin de Nuit is one of Boesmans’ later compositions. Written in 2017, after completing his opera Pinocchio, this singular concertante work received its premiere in 2019. Singular, because it is only in the second movement of this two-part composition that one realises it is, in fact, a piano concerto. In the first movement, ‘Dernier Rêve’, the pianist remains silent. Here, Boesmans chiefly displays his mastery of timbre: a rich orchestral language in dark hues, much as he had explored the shadowy sides of Carlo Collodi’s tale in his fairy-tale opera about the living marionette.
In the second movement, ‘Envols’, the soloist is given free rein to demonstrate their virtuosity. The pianist almost immediately sets the tone with a gentle rêverie, taken up by the orchestra. Yet before long, greater bombast and menace creep into this dream world. The figure at the keyboard must work their way through rapid passages and sharp, even biting trills, bringing the concertante character of the piece ever more to the fore. And yet, here too, one of the most important narrative elements in Boesmans’ musical language is silence. Rests are almost as significant as notes. The piano’s hammers seem to strike the strings in a vacuum; sounds are allowed to fade away to the softest whisper, heightening the contrast with the mighty orchestral outbursts.
Winking through music history
That Philippe Boesmans is flanked in this programme by Claude Debussy and Richard Wagner comes as no great surprise. Boesmans was always a composer who looked over his shoulder, keenly aware of what his predecessors had already set in motion. One of his earliest commissions involved writing pastiches for RTBF radio plays, in which he had to imitate the style of another composer. This playful engagement with reference would remain a lifelong trait.
As a young student at the Liège Conservatoire, Boesmans was already an ardent Wagnerian. He borrowed scores from the library – often piano reductions – to play through them himself and thus fathom their workings. In 1957, barely twenty years old, he attended his first opera at La Monnaie: Tristan und Isolde. It was an experience that left an indelible impression.
That influence remains audible, though often filtered through irony. Boesmans’ final opera, On purge bébé, based on a vaudeville by Feydeau, features a constipated child and a seller of toilet bowls as its protagonists. When porcelain chamber pots appear on stage, Boesmans quotes the Grail motif from Wagner’s opera Parsifal.
He was nourished by many different currents at once. He always liked to refer to different composers, whether Debussy, Poulenc or even Puccini. That is what makes it so beautiful: the passing on of composers from the past, a kind of symbiosis. He was not ashamed to refer to different styles. Philippe was a kind of musical mille-feuille.
Such winks are typical of Boesmans. He also cast a longing glance towards Claude Debussy. A reviewer for Crescendo Magazine even compared his Au Monde, from 2014, to the French composer’s only opera: ‘We are astonished by this naturalness, this constantly fertile and effervescent inventiveness, in which we certainly recognise the influence of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in the treatment of the voice.’
Like Debussy, Boesmans shared a fascination with blur and suggestion, and with music’s power to express what words struggle to convey. It is music that does not spell everything out, but leaves room for doubt and silence – just as in Fin de Nuit.
Patricia Petibon, who sang the role of La seconde fille in that opera, likewise acknowledged this source of inspiration:
‘He was nourished by many different currents at once. He always liked to refer to different composers, whether Debussy, Poulenc or even Puccini. That is what makes it so beautiful: the passing on of composers from the past, a kind of symbiosis. He was not ashamed to refer to different styles. Philippe was a kind of musical mille-feuille.’
