The Boulez Paradox: Preview to His Ten Best Recordings
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 ธ.ค. 2021
- Please join me for a discussion of Pierre Boulez's ten best recordings, ad free, at the ClassicsToday.com Insider site. If you aren't yet an Insider subscriber, you can sign up at the link below: www.classicstoday.com/classic.... In the meantime, please enjoy this preview discussion of the great French conductor and musical modernist. We look forward to welcoming you to our Insider family!
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Dave Hurwitz is such a great resource - I enjoy his videos very much - he is engaging, informative and does a great job, to all of our benefit. Thanks, Dave!
I LOVE this! Thank you!
Fantastic! Thanks Dave.
I had the honor of hearing him do the Janacek Sinfonietta and Bluebeard’s Castle in Cleveland 15 years ago. You talk about him being a chord guy, the 5th door opening in severance hall was one of the most amazing moments I’ve ever had in a concert hall.
On a humorous note, when my undergrad choir director was retiring, we asked him what the worst concert he ever went to was, he said “I heard the Boulez with the NY Philharmonic do Tchaikovsky 4. If I have to explain to you why, you either don’t know Boulez or you don’t know Tchaikovsky 4.”
Check out David's "Senseless Janssons Box" video.
He's got pretty good points on why he doesn't give a damn about live performances by 'conductor x' in 'type in date and location'.
@@estel5335 Yah, i saw that video and I’ve heard Dave’s thoughts on that, except both examples I gave are par for the course what to expect from Boulez, as evidenced by his two fabulous recordings of Bluebeard’s castle, his rapport and history with the Cleveland orchestra.
We’re not talking about someone like Jansons who was hit and miss who once in a while made things go right, I’m talking about someone who was known for something specific, Boulez being someone who specialized in sonority of chords in one of the most famous moments of grand orchestral chords in all of opera, with an orchestra he had a long and productive working relationship as evidenced by his recorded legacy.
And as far as Tchaikovsky goes, that also is in line with what we expect from Boulez.
The point about the Jansons video is that not every concert was worth recording for posterity and that just because you heard something live in concert doesn’t mean it’s going to hold up with repeated hearings.
The aforementioned live performances are indicative of was kept for posterity, so go be a troll someplace else where you’re actually saying something worth writing about Boulez’s legacy, rather than wah wah wah-ing like a sniveling little tattle tale.
@@djquinn4212 Well said about pertinent examples of a live performance proving the rule of a conductor’s legacy, and well said about this idiot troll.
things are heating up at the bridge club
@@djquinn4212 Why get emotional in defense of someone who evinced no emotion in his music?
Another very honest and insightful review.
Boulez Zappa The Perfect Stranger !
Boulez's DG Bartok gets trashed often, but I own both the Sony Classical and DG Bartok boxes. They both have their pros and cons. I really like the Chicago "Wooden Prince", as well the three piano concertos (with different pianists, as we all know). I also enjoy his Mahler box. It has most everything by Mahler in it. I like it that the Cleveland Orch. got included (they play wonderfully!), and that Boulez got really clean, rhythmic playing out of the Vienna Phil. Also, DG lined up pretty good singers for Mahler's vocal works for Boulez, with the singular exception of "Das Lied von der Erde" (poorly sung) Tenor Johan Botha is terrific in Boulez's very 'musical' Mahler 8. I think we're all in agreement that his Berlin Ravel is really, really good. His DG Debussy isn't for everyone, but I like it too. Like you, David, it's Boulez's own compositions that I have plenty of reservations about. As with most composers, some of his works are better than others. And just as a novelty item, I enjoy that Boulez recorded a full disc of Frank Zappa's music. It might have been nice if Boulez had recorded some Janacek in Cleveland, but we have plenty of great Janacek available these days.
Boulez's Mahler 6 is my favourite. Also an excellent 5. Heard better 1s though.
The Jansons addendum just shows what a straight shooter David is, full respect!
There were many works he did really well. These included a number of late or post romantic works that he could have done more of, rerecording Parsifal and recording Bruckner 7 with the VPO. Some of the works he did well or interestingly did not stay in the catalogue or were not recorded. His concert repetoire was broader than his recorded repetoire and could make for lively and interesting experiences. He was too specialist in his choice of repetoire.. He is said to have had too much power in Paris. He spent too much time revising his own works which tend to be too complex to perform as repetoire. His repetoire generally became broader over time. He did too many ultra modernistic works while with the BBCSO and could be ruthless in how he got orchestras to play very technically challenging music. His BBC Prom concerts were terrific live music making to a large young public. Around that time especially at the BBC Proms other conductors filled in gaps in the repetoire not covered by Boulez. Cleveland, Chicago and later Salzburg welcomed him and for a period he toured with the LSO.
I know this is about recordings, but to defend Boulez I would say that when I lived in London and particularly in the 1970s, Boulez with the BBC Symphony Orchestra offered concerts of music that had not been heard before, notably in the case of Schoenberg, the Jakobsleiter, and at the Proms, the Gurrelieder, and Moses und Aron. Whatever you think of them as music, it was an opportunity to hear first class musicians and singers doing these pieces Also at the Proms was La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jesus Christ by Messiaen who was there, again a work that is rarely performed. In the same era, Andre Previn and the LSO were performing at that timer rarely performed works by Prokofiev, Rachmaninov and Shostakovich while with the English Chamber Orchestra, Barenboim was giving fresh impetus to the music of Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert- three conductors covering most of the best of modern music, and what a feast of joy it was!
Boulez doesn't need anyone to defend him. His accomplishments (and there were many) speak for themselves.
He liked Vaughan Williams, lol. I'm really looking forward to your Insider video later but its true that just when you think you have Boulez pinned down, he somehow escapes! That Janacek (which he seems to have been very serious about) at the end, for example, and the Bruckner disc which he was disarmingly modest about. As for America, its interesting that he had such a good relationship with Carter and also with Steve Reich, who is always very complimentary about him. John Adams not so much, but I think that shows taste. I don't know about IRCAM, but nonetheless, apart from his own music (his non electronic music is much better, particularly Sur Incises and Derive 2) we have Saariaho, Tristan Murail, Jonathan Harvey etc out of that and these are worthwhile composers. Just a fascinating personality who somehow channelled, if I can say, a rather sad sexual repression into a remarkable display of 20th century music. Of course the DVDs of the Ring and of Pelleas are really indispensable :) Good for him!
Could you expand on your "sad sexual repression" comment?
@@pelodelperro he was closeted long after it was necessary while posing as some kind of radical. When touring he introduced his partner as hired help rather than his life partner.
For some reason I thought Boulez hated Reich's music - though maybe this was at the time when minimalism seemed reactionary to modernist music, and Boulez did mellow out quite a bit later. I know Carter hated it- I think he was the one who called it fascist music or something like that.
Hello all. Yes it did seem that he was sadly in the closet until the very last. Hopefully his relationship made him happy though. Yes he liked Steve Reich’s music, much as Ligeti did. And in this connection the Ensemble Intercontemparain is surely one of his enduring achievements
@@murraylow4523 good comment
Dave, Boulez recorded some Wagner, Mahler and Bruckner in addition to his Stravinsky/Bartok/Debussy/Ravel/2nd Viennese
School core repertoire. How do you rate his German Romantic recordings?
See my reviews on ClassicsToday.com. That should answer your question.
The Boulez recording of Handel, of all people (to be specific, Water Music and Royal Fireworks Music, methinks). In no way does it seem unidiomatic or of inàppropriate character; it is just excellent music, performed in a slightly idiosyncratic yet excellent fashion.
Great talk, along with the Insider review. I was partly disappointed you couldn't explain Boulez's seeming indifference to late Stravinsky, and partly puffed up to know this has stumped the most knowledgeable critics. I spent a lot of time hunting for a Boulez recording of Agon. I ended up buying Vol.2 of his recordings with Le Domaine Musical, only to discover that Agon is conducted by Hans Rosbaud. No slouch, but not who I was looking for. (Sound quality is poor, also.) I thought maybe Boulez didn't approve of Stravinsky's "repurposing" of the 12-tone method in his late works, just as Schoenberg couldn't take on Lulu for similar reasons (or so I've heard.) Yet, someone once told me he heard him in concert with Chicago, and that "he nailed it." No doubt!
I got to thinking about Nonesuch Records and their wonderful Contemporary Music Series in the 70s and 80s--Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children, Pierrot Lunaire with Jan DeGaetani, Paul Jacob's Debussy, etc. etc. Would you ever be inclined, or induced, to doing a salute to Nonesuch and their history? Even before the Contemporary series, they seemed to be a pretty unique budget label. And their Peter Max-ish cover art is a sort of time capsule.
No, that doesn't really interest me unless there is a major series of reissues. I see not point in discussing recordings most of which no one can hear.
Don't forget Morton Subotnick's Silver Apples of the Moon - the first electronic record commissioned by a record company! (prior releases were the results of academy grants or stuff like the BBC workshop)
A wonderfully insightful analysis of a truly distinctive musician. I can't say that I found a lot of his work especially appealing but I could tell it came from enormous intelligence and commitment. i learned a lot from this presentation which will help me appreciate him much more. when I was in college it seemed many critics were raving about his early 60s Le Sacre du Printemps with the ORTF. I think I got it on a Nonesuch LP and played it to death. i loved the work and still do. What is your opinion of that recording? Thanks for a great video!
I think that early Rite is simply awful--just a mess..
Thanks for your honesty! Eventually I graduated to Bernstein and Ozawa!
That's a terrific list, to the contents of which I will duly make no reference, but I'd have to mention one perhaps unusual choice I'd have wanted to add. I absolutely love his recording of Schoenberg's gnarly Piano Concerto with Mitsuko Uchida. (The rest of the disc is Uchida assaying solo piano pieces by Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg--so it's not a full Boulez disc.) I know you have a fondness for (or developed Stockholm Syndrome with respect to) the Schoenberg Violin Concerto--what do you make of the Piano Concerto, and what did you think of Boulez and Uchida's rendition of it?
These talks are the only good thing about Mondays...
I think it's a wonderful performance of a great work, and it easily could have made the list. Thanks for not giving away the game.
I think you hit on something very key, something that Kyle Gann has also talked about over the years: that the relatively famous guys who came out of Darmstadt (Boulez and Stockhausen) were excellent self-promoters and political operators. There were a slew of guys that I think wrote much better music in that vein who didn't get half the attention: Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, Henri Pousseur, Dallapiccola. And honestly, for all his prickliness and militancy, even Milton Babbitt had more of a sense of humor and playfulness than his European counterparts. It's utterly impossible to imagine Boulez writing a piece for jazz ensemble like Babbitt did with "All Set."
I don't think dodecaphonic music would have ever become crowd-pleasers, but kind of like how the Berg Violin Concerto has become a fringe repertoire piece, I think some of this music showed that you really could do something compelling with this approach, and not just write music for grad students hunting for trichords.
To an extent that's part of the game, though French art scenes (both before and during the Modern era) seem to be full of politics, back-scratching and back-stabbing. Some of the stories about the operatic world in Paris back in the 19th century are-well, it didn't fall far from the tree.
French composers in the Romantic era always seemed like they considered trashing the work of others to be as much a sport as anything else, resulting in some of the funniest quotes about fellow composers in musical history.
I would second above all Maderna (Nono too, but he takes some getting used to…); Maderna’s orchestral music speaks as much of Berg and Mahler as it does Webern and Varèse. His double concerto Grande Aulodia I would recommend to anyone unconvinced about Darmstadt music, above all for the extraordinary ending, between heterophonic melisma on the soloists and a string chorale of unprecedented sumptuousness.
Among those Italians belongs Berio!
I laugh when I hear people pontificate on modern music and make broad statements about the superiority of dodecaphonic pieces. There are many great such pieces, and music listeners know that, but there are also a boatload of such pieces that I would pass up to listen to a well-played version of Happy Birthday to You on a toy piano. Broad statements make for narrow minds.
Boulez's repertoire = whatever is not Harnoncourt's repertoire (except a few Brrrruckner symphonies, which both did, and all russian symphonies, which neither of them did). Right?
I don't understand the point in making the comparison. I can think of plenty of other conductors you might name.
Boulez (1925 - 2016), Harnoncourt (1929 - 2016), identical timeframe but exactly complementary careers in recorded repertoire. Of course, many other comparisons can be made, but they both started as enfant- terribles in their respective repertoires around the 60's, and I always wondered where they would encounter in repertoire as Harnoncourt advanced in centuries and Boulez went back. It was just in Bruckner, as far as I know. Just for fun.
@@jaimemartinpacheco4887 Boulez conducted (and recorded) Handel and
…Beethoven, and Harnoncourt ventured into Bartók.
Dennis Bade Thanks for the info, of course you are right, I was not aware of the Handel record by Boulez or the other 2 examples. However, I still find Boulez and Harnoncourt like "soulmates" (serious, scholars, very respected) but almost perfectly complementary in the austro-german-french repertoire.