Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Last season he was at his most erratic. At least twice he reached the top of his game, with an all-Bartok program and a concert performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron. These are on my short list of all-time great concerts; Boulez’s adventurous taste, his brilliantly analytical clarity, his imaginative sympathy, and his forceful dramatic intelligence all came together to illuminate some of the darkest and most difficult music ever composed. But several other performances were grindingly dull, and a couple were travesties–particularly his kitschy take on Debussy’s La mer and a senselessly jumbled Symphonie fantastique. He was so awful with them, in fact, that he might have been doing it deliberately. He’s always been a man of narrow tastes and fiercely held convictions, and it’s an article of faith with him that the harshest, most dissonant masterworks of 20th-century atonality are vastly better than the beloved classics of 19th-century romanticism. So I wouldn’t put it past him to trash some familiar, user-friendly standard like La mer just to make it look like overrated bilge.
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But this season he kept his temper. He gave four programs, three with the CSO and one with his own chamber group, the Ensemble Intercontemporain; and while there were a few flops and a lot of uninspired moments, there weren’t any explosions of gross perversity. He picked out an unusual collection of music: a big world premiere by contemporary French composer Philippe Manoury, a lot of atonal modernism, and a handful of obscurities by Debussy and Stravinsky. There were also a couple of pieces so unlike Boulez’s usual taste I couldn’t help wondering if he’d programmed them because he’d lost a bet: Richard Strauss’s suite from Le bourgeois gentilhomme and Anton Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony. Overall the performances were decent. The CSO sometimes sounded underrehearsed–though the playing of the Ensemble Intercontemporain was impressively fervent–and Boulez often seemed disengaged. But there were a couple of spectacular successes, especially with the very music I would have thought he most despised. That was the real shock this season: how relaxed, confident, and indulgent he was toward conservative composers he used to regard as his mortal enemies.
In some ways that was the most impressive performance in the whole series. But Boulez also came up with good, strong versions of a couple of his old standbys. He played Webern’s Five Movements for string orchestra, not a wholly characteristic work, in that it’s long, leisurely, and almost expansive–Webern’s scores are usually so sparse and parsimonious you’d think he’d had to pay for each note. But Boulez is always up for Webern’s music, even when it isn’t rigorously austere, and he conducted it with such committed understanding that its encrypted hints of interior emotion seemed as lush as Swan Lake. He was also good, though a little odd, with the suite from Berg’s opera Lulu. Usually he gives Berg a needlelike precision, but here he was loose and almost sloppy (this is where the CSO sounded the least well rehearsed). Yet the performance didn’t sound wrong; it had an air of confused and sinister uproar that fit perfectly the opera’s weird, almost inadvertent tone of gathering hysteria. This has been something of a trend for Boulez in his recent concerts–attributing intense emotion to music that’s normally thought of as austerely doctrinaire. What he did with the Webern and the Berg was a more modest version of the spectacular trick he pulled off last season with Moses und Aron, an astringent work about as approachable as a puff adder but conducted with such passion you’d have sworn it was the most floridly expressive opera in the repertoire.
He was much more impressive with the Bruckner, because he had to take it slowly: a fast Bruckner is a contradiction in terms. The Ninth is characteristically titanic and brooding, the archetypal romantic symphony spun out to the size of a sunset. Bruckner completed only the first three movements, but it still runs more than an hour, its dreamy themes expanding and dissipating with the grandeur of cumulus clouds passing over a mountain range. At its heart is his curious fusion of romantic sensibility and Catholic faith. The humblest devotion is expressed in terms of the most extreme individual eccentricity–it’s a cosmic drama about the littleness of the human soul. Boulez’s version wasn’t particularly spiritual, but heavy as it was on the rubato and the slowly suspended crescendos, it did get across a sense of immense movement, of pulses of strange, timeless energy ebbing and flowing beneath the surface of 19th-century convention. It suggested something about Bruckner that had never occurred to me before: that he was a kind of modernist, if not musically then by temperament. His vast oceanic visions are curiously like the radical intellectual vistas opened up by Victorian science; they might almost symbolize those geological ages and evolutionary forces whose discovery undermined the conventional pieties of the age.
