NYT: Pierre Boulez: The Complete Columbia Album Collection

[Frank Forman]

Pierre Boulez: The Complete Columbia Album Collection
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/arts/music/pierre-boulez-the-complete-columbia-album-collection.html

By DAVID ALLEN

"Da da da DAH!"

Music's most famous opening is also one of its least predictable.
The whole trajectory of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony rides on its
opening rest--a sharp intake of breath--and its first four
notes. Questions receive early answers, setting expectations to be
fulfilled over the next half-hour. (Or not.) What are a conductor's
philosophical and artistic commitments? What textures will be
deployed? What risks will be taken, what rewards granted? Over the
last 60 or so years, tastes have become faster, tougher, more
astringent. What was once radical--Beethoven the arsonist,
torching the rule book--is now the norm.

Perhaps, then, Pierre Boulez's recording of the Fifth with the New
Philharmonia Orchestra of London can finally be rehabilitated, as an
equal and opposite reaction. It was taped at the end of 1968,
released on vinyl in Beethoven's anniversary year of 1970 and sold
in the United States until 1982. A revolutionary's thoughts on a
revolutionary work, it has been almost impossible to find since as,
for reasons that remain obscure, it never made the transition to CD
(except in Japan). Years ago, I paid an inordinate sum for a
secondhand copy, only later to be driven mad by a scratch slightly
behind the final movement's beat.

Now it has finally emerged in pristine sound, as part of a vital,
solidly presented boxed set produced by Sony Classical, "Pierre
Boulez: The Complete Columbia Album Collection" (Sony 88843013332,
available for around $200). The tapings date mostly from the 1960s
to the '80s, covering his partnerships with the Cleveland Orchestra,
the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the
Ensemble InterContemporain and the New York Philharmonic, of which
Mr. Boulez was music director from 1971 to 1977. It runs to a
shelf-buckling 67 CDs.

Why now? In an interview by email, Bogdan Roscic, the president of
Sony Music Masterworks, said that with Mr. Boulez's 90th birthday
approaching next March, "we wanted to present as complete a picture
as we could of his work as a conductor." (The set omits the
recordings he has made for Deutsche Grammophon.) Lumbered with long
back catalogs and shrinking demand, record companies have let loose
a deluge of boxed sets, often covering the complete careers of
conductors, pianists, singers and everything in between. These are
niche products, but often successful ones. Mr. Roscic said that the
target audience for such sets is the collector's market, "people who
appreciate an authoritative career overview," listeners who already
have many but not all of the recordings in a new box--or none at
all.

Though an example of the trend, this set is rare for its coherent
approach to making music: clear, expository and revelatory, treating
older and contemporary music with equal weight. For once and for
all, it should counter Mr. Boulez's reputation for dryly
intellectual, emotionless conducting, the work of a
composer-conductor trying objectively to reveal structure at the
expense of everything else.

Much has been reissued before. Mr. Boulez's devastating "Wozzeck"
from the Opéra National de Paris and his incendiary Covent Garden
"Pelléas et Mélisande," for instance, have long anchored my
understanding of those pieces. There are other core recordings here,
too, like Debussy with the New Philharmonia and an important
traversal of Schoenberg with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Among
multiple recordings of Berg's "Altenberg Lieder" and "Seven Early
Songs" in the set, versions that Mr. Boulez recorded with Halina
Lukomska and Heather Harper receive their first digital releases and
surprise with his lush colorations. And there are surprises, too,
like a raucous reading of Roussel's Third Symphony, a vigorous
performance of Handel's "Water Music," a lurid account of the Dukas
ballet "La Péri" and Wagnerian rarities like the early choral piece
"Das Liebesmahl der Apostel."

Yet amid all that, the Beethoven is the real novelty. So why the
fuss? Why, in a set so filled with 20th-century riches, focus on an
omnipresent work and a performance that Mr. Boulez told Jean
Vermeil, an interviewer in the late 1980s, was "perhaps not the best
thing I've ever done"? Well, bootleg recordings of some of his other
performances notwithstanding, this is the only Beethoven symphony
that Mr. Boulez has ever allowed to be released. Few would associate
this conductor with this composer, even though Mr. Boulez has led
most of the symphonies during his career. In its stripping away of
all sense of tradition and extra-musical narrative--fate knocking
at the door, and so on--this Fifth was highly controversial.

The problem is speed. Few conductors in the decades before period
performance practice took seriously Beethoven's metronome marking of
108 bars per minute, but Mr. Boulez openly mocks it, in a deliberate
provocation. Scarcely reaching three-quarters of that speed, he
clocks in at just over 70. His crucial opening gambit sounds like a
giant industrial machine whirring into life. It shocks with its
slowness, its merciless weight so mighty it's as if time itself,
rather than the music, has slowed down, crushing all in its path.

For nearly 10 minutes, this is Beethoven as process, all of its cogs
grinding as audibly as in any of the conductor's Webern. "I simply
cannot believe," Trevor Harvey wrote in Gramophone in 1970, that
"Beethoven meant it to go like this." Reflecting later, Mr. Boulez
said, "I would probably take that rather faster," but he also argued
that conductors "took off like bats out of hell in the first
movement," diminishing its weight. "Certain things set one off," he
recalled of their eagerness.

A sense of experimentation dominates the rest of the work, as if it
were new music itself. Mr. Boulez maintains his steely, almost
militaristic approach in the last three movements, his speeds more
ordinary but still imbued with density and immovability. In the
scherzo, heft sits uneasily alongside sharp accents and rustic
flavors. Even the finale operates rather than sweeps away, with Mr.
Boulez's precise balances allowing crucial woodwind contributions to
be heard, everything phrased insistently in fours, transformed.
'
Is this relative restraint what is called for here? Probably not. To
my ears, the recording sounds less like an ardent political
statement--in 1968 of all years--than a mouthing of disbelieved
slogans. Perhaps it's a demonstration of the argument that "the
dreams of the future will never again ... take shape in this
landscape," as Mr. Boulez wrote of Beethoven in a 1970 poem. But to
hear this recording is--like the most valuable recordings of any
work--fundamentally to change the way you think of the symphony. I
could never recommend it as a reference recording, but it is an
essential statement of the Fifth's possibilities nonetheless.

The box's 66 other CDs are a reminder of the breadth of Mr. Boulez's
repertoire. Many also distort how progressive his time at the New
York Philharmonic really was. To look back at the programs he
constructed--all now visible online through the orchestra's
valuable Performance History Search feature--is to see remarkable
vision. Writing in The New York Times, Harold C. Schonberg called
the Boulez years "a revolution in program making" after his
departure from the orchestra in May 1977. Subscription concerts, not
just the innovative "rug concerts" for young people, might have
included Mendelssohn, Ravel, Crumb and Stravinsky, or Boyce, Mozart,
Carter and Debussy, or even entire Haydn operas and Liszt oratorios
since lost to posterity.

Remarkably, Mr. Schonberg reported that ticket sales in the Boulez
era averaged 97 percent of capacity, although we should not draw a
straight line from his adventure to any commercial success. Sony's
boxed set contains important recordings with the Philharmonic
ranging from Berlioz and Falla to Bartok and Stravinsky, but almost
none of the repertoire he used to balance his modernism. Most of the
works Mr. Boulez presented from the "museum"--his metaphor for a
canon he could constantly rearrange and escape from--were never
recorded commercially, including Bach, Mozart, and Mendelssohn, as
well as riskier fare like Gabrieli, Rameau and countless of Mr.
Boulez's own contemporaries.

Mr. Schonberg wrote that when Mr. Boulez performed the works of many
of those composers, "the results could be catastrophic." Mr. Boulez
himself admitted in his interviews with Mr. Vermeil that he "felt no
affinity" with many of them. But that was not always the case, and
as we assess Mr. Boulez's legacy, as surely we will, we should know
for ourselves. Are his takes on these pieces forever lost?

Let's hope not. Most of Mr. Boulez's concerts with the Philharmonic
were recorded as radio broadcasts. Asked whether there was any
possibility of that archival hoard being released, Katherine E.
Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Philharmonic, said that the material
was unlikely to be released commercially. But the Philharmonic is
developing plans to release sections of its audio collection as part
of the Leon Levy Digital Archives, including performances from the
Boulez years.

Perhaps those recordings, like those in Sony's set, will serve to
undermine reigning preconceptions of Mr. Boulez as the cold,
dispassionate thinker heard by Mr. Schonberg and others in the
1970s. More important, through the work of a man who in 1960 wrote
that the conductor should be "neither oracle nor flunky," "neither
angel nor animal," we might question once again the music we hear.