Boulez/NYPO Beethoven 9

[etucker82]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaEIO9qlBdE&feature=related

A live performance of Beethoven 9 is up on youtube that purports to be from Pierre Boulez and the New York Phil.  I'm a little skeptical, because...well....listen to it.

This is nothing less than a stunning performance, and one that is almost completely uncharacteristic of Boulez.  This sounds like Mengelberg in better sound.  Sure, it has almost razor-sharp execution all the way through, it's Boulez after all.  But this is simply one of the most Romantic performances I've ever heard.  The orchestral sound is explosive, Boulez holds nothing back.  The timpani hammers away all the way through, the brass cut through the texture every time.  Would that Boulez's Mahler were consistently this involving.  Rubato goes through this entire performance like a fish to water. 

I suppose anyone who has heard Boulez's recording of Bruckner 8 won't be completely surprised by this (the extremely flexible slow movement of that recording may be the best I've ever heard), but Boulez is such a stranger to this style that I'm simply stunned that he had this in him.  I'm not a Boulez fan generally.  I admire the innate musicianship, but I don't think there is a single musical figure who's had a worse effect on classical music in our time.   He rarely seems to 'get' personalized emotion.  The thought occurred to me while listening to his VPO M2 that he seems to view the extreme emotions as a charming tick of certain composer's musical personalities rather than the most integral part of the musical fabric.  More often than not, he presents Mahler stripped of angst, Debussy without the voluptuousness, Bartok without the violence, Stravinsky without the irony.  And yet sometimes he turns on the music's emotions like a switch.  It just shows yet again that Boulez is a musician of genius whose natural intelligence has caused him to colossally misuse the talents of thousands of musicians (to say nothing of his own).

[Russell]

I remember Columbia issuing an LP of a Boulez Beethoven 5th some years ago (not with the NYP but one of the British orchestras, I think).  I've never heard it, but it was roundly criticized for being absurdly slow and totally unidiomatic.  I don't believe Sony has released it on CD anywhere--probably with good reason.  I'd love to hear it now, though.  Will give a listen to that 9th later when I've got more time.

BTW, you might also want to post this on the Audio Asylum Music Forum (http://www.audioasylum.com/audio/music/bbs.html), where you would very likely get some interesting responses.  (I know there are many other music forums, but I happen to like this one and I visit it very often.)

Russell

[barry guerrero]

"I admire the innate musicianship, but I don't think there is a single musical figure who's had a worse effect on classical music in our time.   He rarely seems to 'get' personalized emotion."

While I think you present your argument quite clearly, I couldn't possibly disagree with you more. I think Boulez has the rare ability to make "modern" music sound like mainstream music - less like some kind of abstraction. He finds the logic and intelligence behind the scores, which is something that holds true for ALL music that endures over the years. What does "personalized emotion" even mean?   .    .   play louder? Use more vibrato? Swing your body around more (like the players in the Berlin Phil. always do)?  What then?

I just don't buy into that. When Boulez has erred, it's because he's allowed tempi to droop just a bit; and, sometimes, the tension sags a bit as well. But what major conductor hasn't been guilty of just THAT from time to time? Haitink seems to be guilty of that fault on almost a daily basis! Abbado has certainly had his fair share of truly boring moments. I just don't buy into this business that Boulez has somehow ruined music. Why?  .    .   because he didn't promote Dutilleux, or perform Magnard symphonies? I don't get that. Heaven forbid that somebody should actually be good at composing and performing "modern" music. I agree that Boulez shouldn't have been heavily subsidized by the French government, but that's an entirely different issue. That's a "shame on the French gov't" issue, not a "shame on Boulez" issue.

How has Boulez's Wagner ruined Wagner? His Mahler, Mahler? His Ravel, Ravel? His Bartok, Bartok? Sorry, but I just can't see that. I'm not sure what people are after when they say things like, "personalized emotion". What ever is, it's often times not an improvement to the overall presentation of the music. It's usually something local, and it usually involves slowing down, or playing louder, or throwing in more vibrato, or drawing attention to some insignificant detail that hinders the overall flow. This young Latin guy, Dudamel, is chalk full of "personalized emotion", and I think it truly hinders what the composer wrote. Dudamel's best work is in fast, highly rhythmic and highly colorful music, where he has no opportunity to "emote" all over the place. Think about it. Music is about music, not about the drama-queen antics of the conductor.

So yes, sure, Boulez's Mahler may be a polar opposite to what were used to from Bernstein or Solti. But that doesn't mean that - at times - it isn't as equally valid or "beautiful" even. There's so music contained within the Mahler canon, that it's certainly possible to entertain a number of difference approaches and possibilities (I hate the word, "interpretation"). I agree that his "Resurrection" isn't among the best, but it's pretty much for two very specific reasons (for me, anyway). One, he's a tad too fast with the scherzo, and fails to get the requisite "hairpin" dynamics out of the woodwinds - more specifically, the clarinets in particular ("hairpin" meaning written crescendos and decrescendos). As a result, his scherzo does lack the humor and irony that's clearly there in text of "St. Anthony's Sermon To The Fishes". And second, there's no organ! You can't do Mahler 2 and Mahler 8 without a strong pipe organ. But he certainly gets plenty of lung power from the Viennese brass, as well the large choral forces employed. By and large, the spirit of the work is there. Not having a decent organ is a huge logistical blunder, and DG needs to shoulder the blame as well.

By the way, I own the dvd of Boulez's Mahler 2 from Berlin, and I think it's vastly better than his studio recording from Vienna. Check it out sometime.

[etucker82]

Barry,

You've articulated quite well the gripe I generally have with the sort of 'objectivist' view that you get from certain music critics (like those on classicstoday).  Personalized emotion is in a large sense always subjective, and an individual's experience of music will always differ from one person to the next.  That is as true for the interpreter as it is for the listener.  So often, musical interpretation comes down to a interpreter's personal reading of a composer's markings.  The wisest view of interpretation I've ever heard is from a teacher of mine: "Interpretation is not about what you want or about what the composer wants.  It's about what you think the composer wants."  But even then, an interpreter often can't help but feel that his idea of how music should sound in his particular circumstances is more justifiable than what the composer has written.  As Sibelius said to Adrian Boult, 'if your instincts go against my markings, please disobey my markings.'  So ultimately, personalized experience of music comes down to two things:

1.  Did it work for me?

2.  Were these judgements made in good faith?

With regard to classicstoday, I'll simply say that their critics have a long history of enormous inconsistency in how these standards are applied.  Whether a performance works for a person is an entirely subjective judgement, but the issue of good faith is not.  As your friend Mr. Hurwitz often points out, there are certain quantifiable and demonstrable 'facts' about interpretation.  Yet somehow, good faith always seems to be impugned to the sloppiness and liberties of conductors like Bernstein, Munch, Jochum, Kubelik, Eschenbach, Harnoncourt, Barenboim.  And yet the same consideration is never shown for conductors like Mengelberg, Koussevitzky, Furtwangler, Barbirolli, Rattle and Gergiev.  I just don't get it and the more time I spend on the site, the less sense it makes to me.

Those musings aside, I'll do my best to answer your questions paragraph by paragraph:

1.   If you believe that a piece of music is no more than the resolution to a series of harmonic problems and rhythmic irregularities, like the step-by-step schematics of a chess book or a mathematical proof, then personalized emotion does not matter in the least.  But if you decide that there are more deep and personal reasons for listening, then personalized emotion is becomes both very important and very simple.  It means nothing more or less than an interpreter's personal view of how a particular piece of music can be rendered for its maximum emotional significance to the listener.  The particular emotional significance will always differ from person to person, and that is why I will never cease to find the topic of music an inexhaustible one for conversation with others. 

2.  Neither Abbado nor Haitink are quite at the top of my pantheon (Abbado's closer).  But Boulez is neither Abbado nor Haitink.  Abbado and Haitink are grey eminences of a single craft whose effects on music have never reached particularly far outside of the realm of the orchestral concert.  Pierre Boulez is a composer of significance (if not enormous distinction) and the most influential polemcist in classical music of the last fifty years.  The climate of fear which his writings created were in no small part responsible for converting Stravinsky to serialism, driving Copland out of composition, isolating Shostakovich from Western contemporaries, and driving a thirty-year wedge through classical musician's ability to conduct dialogues with popular genres.  And that's just what we know about.  Who knows how many great musical identies were lost to us by their languishing in a conservatory composition program that insisted that atonal serialism as the only viable way to compose.  I love a lot of atonal music, but I blame Pierre Boulez above all others for creating a climate that ostracized any aspiring composer who did not tow his party line. 

3.  Boulez has not ruined composers who were already great, they will outlast him.  But he may have ruined many listeners' relationships with them.  Music is music, but it's also whatever the listener's mind interprets music to be. If a conductor decides to perform Bartok and Stravinsky without honoring the details of the oral folk traditions from which they sprung, or Wagner's writings about elastic phrase (which had an enormous impact on Mahler) it misrepresents the composer's intent as much as disobeying a score marking.  Furthermore, it's an approach to music that makes listening to it far drier and more academic.  Without understanding the styles from which great composer's sprung, how will new listeners understand the context of what makes these masters great?  Perhaps it's no wonder that classical music has a problem drawing intelligent people of any age to the concert hall.  If music is just a collection of symbols on a page to be played exactly as written, then it's an entirely quantifiable art.  So what point is there to listen to anything but Elliott Carter?  Also, Dudamel, like Gergiev before him, is a musician of brilliant instincts and little capacity for introspection.  There are certain depths he will probably never get to, but that doesn't mean his performances won't be exciting as hell. 

5.  I don't at all fault Boulez for an understated approach.  I fault him for an exclusionary one.  Boulez is entirely uninterested in whole aspects of what makes music worth listening to, and then implies that the rest of us mortals are inferior music-lovers simply because we disagree with him.  In politics, the word for this is demagoguery.  In classical music, the word for this is endowed chair. 

And now...to sleep....perchance to dream...of a Fischer Mahler 9.

[barry guerrero]

If somebody "endowed" Boulez, that's the fault of those people - not Boulez. That's like saying the American people aren't at fault for allowing George Bush to have been in charge for 8 full years. Why not pardon Germans - of previous generations, that is - for bringing the nazis to power then, etc.?

[etucker82]

Well I'm sorry to say that that's being willfully naive of both Boulez's deviousness and Bush's.

Happy Easter btw.

[barry guerrero]

I think Bush's deviousness is far more tangible than Boulez's, but that's just me.

[etucker82]

It's pretty useless to turn this into a game of snark oneupmanship.  Let's just agree to disagree.

[barry guerrero]

I don't think it's snarky one-ups-mans-ship at all. I think it's a fact. What Bush did (and didn't do) directly effected the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, if not more. It effected their health, welfare, livelihood, mortality - you name it. You accused Boulez of more or less ruining music ("worse effect", I think were the words). Even if that were true, how would that possibly compare? Have you listened to Top 40 radio lately? -  I'm not even sure there is such a thing anymore. Were you FORCED to listen to Boulez as a conductor? Did a teacher make you do it? What about people who actually like some of his compositions?  They exist, you know (and I'm one of them). Have other musicians been forced to conduct just like Boulez does? Frankly, I've seen darn few conductors imitate what he does at all  (and I'm sure you're glad for that). Frank Zappa came about the closest. And, as a point of irony, Dave Hurwitz of Classicstoday is, to some extent, in your camp regarding Boulez. I've been very good friends with Mr. Hurwitz over the last several decades, but this is one musical point I happen to disagree with him about. That doesn't mean that we would come to blows over it, because we both know that it doesn't matter in relation to what politicians and lawmakers do. In fact, it hardly matters at all. Why is that not an obvious point?

So yes, I will certainly agree to disagree with you.  And, as a coincidence, I just happened to pick up a spare copy of Boulez's VPO Mahler 6 just today. It was a used copy in perfect shape, and I've been wanting a back-up copy for a while now. I own many different versions of Mahler 6, but I happen to like the Boulez one very much (I liked his earlier BBC S.O. one even more). I think his Vienna M6 and M3 are very good, as well as the shorter song cycles disc that he also made in Vienna (frankly, I would take it over the Bernstein one, made with the oft over-wrought Thomas Hampson). I also enjoy his Staatskapelle Berlin M8 much, MUCH more than the greatly bally-hoo'd MTT/SFSO one, in spite what few faults it may have. So yes, I do disagree. I think it has very little to do with "objectivity", or "subjectivity".

 I think it has to do with judging each recording separately - regardless of who the artists are (that hardly matters to me) - and judging them  in relation to what the composer actually penned down on paper (otherwise, what standards are there?), as well as judging them in relation to the already recorded competition. Otherwise, all we're doing - as critics - is imposing our own emotional responses on to others. In my opinion, a good critic describes what a recording sounds like in the most tangible means possible, and then allows the reader to make up their own mind whether or not that particularly recording is for them (or not). That doesn't mean that a critic shouldn't have an opinion - it just means that a critic should at least attempt to adhere to some comparative standards. And believe me, I'm not saying that I've always been a great critic (or something more than a flawed person). But I do think I'm better than many of them. For one thing, I stick to what little I truly know.

Let's just take Boulez's Bartok as an example (which you claim to be so poor). Are there better recordings of the "Concerto For Orchestra"? Of course there are. I think Reiner, Kubelik, and Dorati are hard to beat (among a few others too). But certainly Boulez's is serviceable enough; but - and more to the point - it comes with a pretty darn good performance of the "Four Orchestral Pieces" - a work I really like. So why should I get rid of it? I happen to really like the Boulez/CSO recording of "The Wooden Prince", which is Boulez's second recording of it. It's a work he really likes, and I think it's a very good one also. Have I been duped?   .    .     .    If so, explain how. Explain to me how that makes me naive (again, you called it).

Are there better recordings of the "Music For Strings, Percussion, and Celeste"? Yes, I believe there are. But the differences aren't that huge, are they? I happen to really like having that work coupled with "The Miraculous Mandarin". I like listening to them together. Is that a problem? I think Boulez's Bartok piano concertos disc - the one with the three different pianists involved - happens to be a really great disc.  Yes, I have the Ivan Fischer recording as well, which has Zoltan Koscis on the piano. I like them both! I own most of Ivan Fischer's Bartok, as well as Boulez's cycle. Perhaps that does make me a naive fool. But if so, explain how!?! Better yet, don't bother. And what about the recent disc that has the viola concerto?   .    .     .   have you truly heard a better one of that piece? I haven't.

Yes, I would say that the "Sonata For 2 Pianos & Percussion" is better in its original sonata version. But it's just nice to also have the concerto version of that work - penned by Bartok himself, after all. And, Leonard Bernstein - someone who certainly wasn't afraid to let his music making be just chalk full of "personal emotions" - recorded the concerto version of the sonata too. Was Bartok naive as well - not knowing that two such polar opposites would someday want to record his own bastardized version (D.H. thinks very little of it)?

[etucker82]

At some point in the near future I'll find a time to reply more fully to this. 

In the meantime: you're seriously twisting words around.

At no point did I say that Boulez's effect on the world was worse than Bush's, and to imply that that is what I said is kind of funny.  But no matter, I'll reply more fully when I can read this without bloodshot eyes.

[barry guerrero]

Please don't bother - not for my benefit, anyway. You said that I was, quote, "willfully naive" regarding both Boulez and Bush. At this point, why should I lend you any further credence? Thus, I will not read any further responses, as I think you're viewpoint on Boulez comes close to being nutty. Sorry, but I do. There's a Boulez backlash now; and yes, I'm sensitive about it.

It's suddenly become fashionable to say that Boulez ruined, or interfered with, the natural progression of music in France. In my opinion, the only French composer - among the ones who I know of, that is - who has been greatly overlooked is Henri Sauget. Anyway, when people buy into that myth, the next step is to say that Boulez is now a fraud, or insincere. Everything he's doing for DG is suddenly suspect. I say, rubbish! If the French government was stupid enough to give him money to sit around the Pompidou Center and make modern music that most people didn't want to listen to, that's THEIR fault - not Boulez's. If you (meaning the collective "you") think that Boulez's early writings are somehow the musical equivalent of "Mein Kampf", I would say that that's attaching waaaaay too much importance to Boulez as a musical artist. Frankly, I agree with some of the things he said, but that's just me. If DG wants to lob a contract at Boulez to record various orchestral standards, that's the fault of DG. By accepting such a contract, he gets to conduct the biggest name orchestras on the planet, so why should he turn that opportunity down? Why does that make him insincere, or suspect? In my opinion, the only real fault I hear in Boulez's work is that he's simply getting old! That's all - it happens to all these guys. When the energy sags somewhere in one of his performances, I don't think it's because he's sitting around and thinking, "oh, I think I'll inject more ice water into everyone's veins". Sorry, but I don't believe that he sits sits around and plots new and more evil ways to make well-known music sound ever more cold and alien. I don't buy into that. Personally, I think that's the work of overactive imaginations, and those who are looking for some kind musical conspiracy story. Even worse, it's yet another stupid and poorly thought-out "thang" for people who know just enough about classical music to get most everything about it wrong, to parrot from one person to the next (and I'm not saying that that's you - I don't know you!). Anyway, I'm done. I'm tired of the anti-Boulez backlash. I think it has very little musical merit behind it.

[etucker82]

Well...all I'll say is....wow.