By Paul Griffiths

The Ensemble intercontemporain is a special example of a strange and wonderful phenomenon: the modern-music ensemble, an outfit designed to perform music that does not (yet) exist.

This particular instance of the species was created in 1976 by Pierre Boulez in association with the French culture minister Michel Guy, both founders providing the group with a solid start. Because it has continued to enjoy the vigorous government support Guy endowed it with, the EIC has been able to maintain a strength of 31 musicians and keep up a busy schedule, which covers—besides full-scale concerts, chamber recitals, and informal events in Paris—tours to other French cities and abroad, including regular visits to the United States.

Boulez, meanwhile, has been the Ensemble’s essential artistic inspiration. He was never its principal conductor: That responsibility was given first to Michel Tabachnik, then assumed by Peter Eötvös (1979-91), David Robertson (1992-2000), and Jonathan Nott (2000-03), to be succeeded next season by Susanna Mälkki. However, Boulez has conducted the EIC often since its inception, and his works remain strong in its repertory. Two of them—Répons (1981) and ...explosante-fixe...(1993)—were written for the Ensemble, involving in each case electronic modification of solo instruments.

That was in keeping with the group’s originally intended function as the house orchestra of the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, the center for new work in music and technology that Boulez and Guy set up in Paris at the same time. Right from the first, however, the EIC was also operating independently, commissioning pieces with no electronic component, by such outstanding composers as Gérard Grisey, Harrison Birtwistle, and György Kurtág. The Ensemble’s move in 1995 from the centrally placed IRCAM to the new Cité de la Musique, on the northeast edge of Paris, was a symbol of separation, though from time to time the two institutions come together again, as they will this season in new works by two of the leading European middle-generation composers: Hanspeter Kyburz and Stefano Gervasoni.

Besides the occasional electronic connection, Boulez gave the EIC, more fundamentally, a sense of repertory that went back to his work with the organization he ran in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, the Domaine Musical. The EIC, like the Domaine, projects a vision of recent music as energized by the great revolutions of the early 20th century. Pieces like Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire—to be performed again this season, as in many before—are presented as classics of intensive change, signposts that will be joined in succeeding decades by others, such as (again to take examples from this season’s repertory) Boulez’s own Le Marteau sans maître or György Ligeti’s Piano Concerto. Like the Domaine, too, the EIC will occasionally open a window on more distant music, and make it, by changing the context, closer. A mini-series in January is devoted to programs oscillating between Mozart and Helmut Lachenmann, and perhaps the older music will burst as much as the newer with fury and hope.

Drawing in all these ways on his Domaine Musical experience, Boulez, in establishing the EIC, was also motivated by the example of the London Sinfonietta, a group that had, partly in imitation of the Domaine, started operations in 1968. Boulez worked often in London during the first half of the 1970s and, having observed the Sinfonietta’s early progress, he invited its founder manager, Nicholas Snowman, to help him build his new team in Paris. He also gave the ensemble its name: “Contemporain” for, of course, the nature of its repertory, and “Inter” for its all-inclusiveness—for indeed, as much as the EIC has followed a Boulezian trajectory, it has also embraced the diversity of current and recent music, from Iannis Xenakis to Arvo Pärt, from Kaija Saariaho to Elliott Carter, from John Adams to Brian Ferneyhough.

Its commercial recordings include choice samplings from most of these composers, as well as albums Boulez has devoted to some of his heros: Stravinsky, Webern, Schoenberg, Varèse, and, among contemporaries, Ligeti, Berio, and Birtwistle—not to mention his own music.However, the Ensemble is defined not only by its documented achievements but by its personnel. Several members of the EIC, like the percussionist Michel Cerutti, have been in the group all through the three decades of its existence; others, like the tuba player Arnaud Boukhitine, were not even born when it gave its first concerts. All are virtuosos. When the EIC programs a concerto, the soloist is normally drawn from the Ensemble’s ranks, while frequent small-scale recitals allow the musicians to disport themselves in the most challenging—and rewarding—modern repertory.

To draw attention to individuals is invidious, so let it be noted that the following cases are merely exemplary. The clarinetist Alain Damiens is a warm and wonderful player, for whom Carter wrote his concerto commissioned by the EIC for its 20th anniversary) and Boulez his solo piece Dialogue de l’ombre double. The phenomenal Pascal Gallois virtually reinvented the bassoon in the process of realizing the great slab of continuous, continuously mobile sound that is Luciano Berio’s Sequenza XII. That same composer features on the oboist László Hadady’s list of recordings, but so does J.S. Bach. And besides Hadady’s Hungary, the group includes musicians from Israel (the trombonist Benny Sluchin), Armenia (the violinist Ashot Sarkissjan), and the United States (the horn player Jens McManama), not to mention Greece, Japan, and Germany, the home territories of the three pianists: Dimitri Vassilakis, Hideki Nagano, and Michael Wendeberg. (The “Inter,” then, could stand for a variety of national as well as stylistic colors.) Other members have won respect for composition (the cellist Pierre Strauch) or stage direction (the bass player Frédéric Stochl). Any of the three violinists—Hae-Sun Kang and Jeanne-Marie Conquer, in addition to Ashot Sarkissjan—could give a dazzling account of the brilliant concerto by Ligeti.

Blessed with such extraordinary players, enjoying return visits from the extraordinary conductors who have led them, and set to embark on a new phase under the direction of the remarkable Susanna Mälkki, the Ensemble intercontemporain will be charting new paths for many years to come.

Paul Griffiths writes music criticism and fiction. In 2005 he published The Penguin Companion to Classical Music, The Substance of Things Heard (a selection of reviews and essays, University of Rochester Press), and his debut recording, with cellist/composer Frances-Marie Uitti, there is still time (ECM).