NYT: Boulez and Harnoncourt, So Different, Yet More Alike Than They Realized

[Frank Forman]

Unfortunately, I have never heard any of Harnoncourt's Mahler. I find that
Boulez's Mahler 6 is refreshingly original and instantly became my
favorite recording of the work. I've heard several other Boulez Mahler
symphonies, but none dislodge Rosbaud's 1 (Danish SO live, which I think I
alone can supply), Scherchen's 2 studio, 3 live and 8 live
and, of course, Mengelberg's live 4.

Boulez and Harnoncourt, So Different, Yet More Alike Than They Realized
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/19/arts/music/boulez-and-harnoncourt-so-different-yet-more-alike-than-they-realized.html

By DAVID ALLEN

It's as if the postwar period itself had died. Within two months,
Pierre Boulez and Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the two avant-gardists who
more than anyone in the last half-century redefined classical music,
were gone.

Their contrasts are obvious. Mr. Boulez, who died on Jan. 5, was
born in 1925, the son of an industrialist. He became the high priest
of high Modernism, a precise carver of sounds on the podium,
vociferous in his promotion of (certain strands of) contemporary
composition, including his own pathbreaking experiments in sonics
and structure. Mr. Harnoncourt, who died on March 5, was the son of
descendants of royalty, born in 1929 as Johann Nikolaus Graf de la
Fontaine und d'Harnoncourt-Unverzagt. He had little interest in
music written after Bartok and Berg, and instead led the charge for
an original-instrument, historically informed performance practice
that is now the norm in early repertory.

Mr. Harnoncourt lectured in rehearsal; Mr. Boulez said barely a
word. Mr. Harnoncourt's conducting style practically ignored the
beat; Mr. Boulez presented it immaculately. Mr. Harnoncourt had one
repertoire; Mr. Boulez had another. If their repertoires crossed
paths, as they did in Haydn and Bruckner, the results were wholly
unalike.

And yet we can draw more parallels between the two than either might
have preferred. After all, as the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who
worked closely with Mr. Boulez and recorded Beethoven and Dvorak
with Mr. Harnoncourt, said in a telephone interview, "They belonged
to the same world, even if they lived in different parts of it."

Each gleefully took sides. Each sought to kill off suffocating
traditions. Each confronted a conservative establishment and created
new ensembles in response. Each advocated repertoire that was
formerly marginal and later became central. Each yoked the
once-growing power of the recording industry to his own purposes:
Mr. Boulez taping the complete works of Webern, and Mr. Harnoncourt
the operas of Monteverdi. Each projected an uncompromising attitude,
even if Mr. Boulez compromised as a music director in London and New
York, and Mr. Harnoncourt in his work with traditional symphony
orchestras. Each was a radical and ended up an honorary member of
the august Vienna Philharmonic.

Their developments can be linked to the irrevocable caesura of war.
"Europe had been destroyed, and had to be rebuilt completely--the
cultural dimension," Mr. Aimard said. "One needed avant-gardists;
one needed people who would be revolutionary and redefine this
world."

Mr. Boulez recalled in 1996: "When you are in a situation after the
Second World War, you become very committed to serving the new
cause." For him, that meant conducting Schoenberg, Webern, Berg,
Bartok and Stravinsky with vitality and accuracy, so that they could
be properly reckoned with by audiences and new composers alike--
even as he demanded that the composers break away from those earlier
models.

While Mr. Harnoncourt blasted atonal and serialist composers (like
Mr. Boulez) for music that "satisfied neither the musician nor the
public," he, like Mr. Boulez, saw a vacuum that needed to be filled.
In his 1954 credo, "The Interpretation of Historical Music," Mr.
Harnoncourt wrote that after Bruckner, Tchaikovsky and Strauss,
"musical life came to a standstill," and argued that an effort "to
do justice to old music as such and to render it in accordance with
the period during which it was composed" was a "symptom of the loss
of a truly living contemporary music." In the absence of such music,
spirited period performance, he believed, could be a replacement.

Both men therefore demanded a certain kind of amnesia. Mr.
Harnoncourt called for musicians to hear and perform pieces "as if
they had never been interpreted before, as if they had never been
formed or distorted." Mr. Boulez saw the music of the past--under
ideal circumstances, that is--as something to be mined purely for
future purposes. He insisted that we "heed it, deform it, forget it,
search for it and re-evaluate it," retaining "of an original source
only that which is directly useful and ultimately perishable."

But in condemning outdated traditions, the two musicians energized
new ones by building novel institutions. Mr. Boulez created the
Domaine Musical concert series in 1954, pioneered at Darmstadt
summer school in the 1950s and, eventually, in the 1970s, built the
Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (Ircam) and
the Ensemble Intercontemporain. Mr. Harnoncourt, along with his
wife, Alice, founded the period-instrument ensemble Concentus
Musicus Wien in 1953.

Such platforms were important in their own right, but these men
formed attitudes, not just orchestras. As those attitudes spread,
the institutional models--new-music ensembles, period bands--
proliferated. The two did not know each other personally, Mr. Aimard
said, adding: "It doesn't matter. What's important is that their
contemporaries could notice that they were lighthouses for their
era."

Their resolutely separate beams--one illuminating the contemporary
route, the other the ancient--intersected more and more for
subsequent musicians. A generation of interpreters began to
integrate the two trends: Simon Rattle, tellingly, rose to
prominence in Britain with three groups: a traditional orchestra,
the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; a new-music group, the
London Sinfonietta; and a period-instrument ensemble, the Orchestra
of the Age of Enlightenment. Mr. Rattle, now the chief conductor of
the Berlin Philharmonic, said in a statement upon Mr. Harnoncourt's
death that "these two extraordinary men who, in their entirely
different ways, changed the way we hear and perceive music, were for
many of us the cornerstones of our musical philosophy."

For a younger generation of conductors, moving between previously
opposed poles comes even easier. Pablo Heras-Casado--at 38, the
principal conductor of the Orchestra of St. Luke's, who befriended
Mr. Boulez and was recently invited to conduct the Concentus Musicus
--argues that both respected text above all. "They were both trying
to create onstage a sense of the uniqueness of each moment," he
said. "A shocking experience that is new and created."

Yet, by Mr. Heras-Casado's age, Mr. Boulez and Mr. Harnoncourt were
both staking claims, claims that might seem outlandish in their
certainty and force if they were made now. Despite their blind
spots, the men's influence eventually led to a healthier, more
diverse, more tolerant musical life--a culture that, for better or
for worse, is notable for its lack of real aesthetic controversies.

Who will move us forward now?