If Pierre Boulez were a different sort of composer, then he might have called this piece ‘Prelude and Fugue’. But then it would have been a different piece. As it is, this relative miniature of seven minutes refrains from any explicit identification with traditional models, even if there is a clear division between the ornamented chords of the first half and the contrapuntal invention of the second, led by the piano. If the piece recalls anything from the past, it is likely to be Boulez’s own Eclat, since there is the same concern in both parts of the work with decorating static harmonies by means of trills and flurries of grace notes. The difference is that the preludial part of Dérive proceeds at the same slow tempo for 26 bars, while the second part just gradually slows down and then returns to the opening speed. Boulez’s customary flexibility is here conveyed not by unstable movement so much as by an unpredictable darting of ideas among the instruments: flute and clarinet, violin and cello, vibraphone and piano.
The work was written as a tribute to Sir William Glock on his retirement in 1984 as director of the Bath Festival – a personal tribute, since it was Glock who brought Boulez over to conduct the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1964 and persuaded him to become its principal conductor seven years later. The title, as usual with Boulez, is hard to translate. In French the word retains, as it does not in English, Latinate connotations of being away from the shore. We are being invited to listen, perhaps, to drifting derivatives.
© Paul Griffiths
