MUSIC REVIEW : Pierre Boulez Festival Opens at Royce Hall

In the aftermath of Andre Previn’s resignation as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, there has been much discussion about what constitutes excitement from the orchestra’s podium, and its impact on attendence. In that regard, Festival Boulez may offer some contradictory, perhaps cautionary, lessons.

In the opening concert of the series Saturday evening at Royce Hall, Pierre Boulez and the Philharmonic virtually defined orchestral stimulation, in sonically overwhelming performances. And did so before a far from full house.

The program, admittedly, was adventuresome. Boulez opened with the West Coast premiere of Luciano Berio’s “Formazioni,” a recent work that takes its title from the unusual set-up of an enlarged orchestra presenting a front of woodwinds and string basses.

Crammed onto the Royce stage, the arrangement showed none of the diagrammed symmetrical elegance, and in its aural effects, one had to wonder how much the eye influenced the ear.

On a first hearing, many of the formal elements of “Formazioni” may have proved elusive, but the immediacy and sheer vitality of the experience were self-evident. The piece is big and bold, with great splashes of rhythmically purposeful color contrasting with quiet moments of independently voiced chamber music. It is given to wild mood swings, pugnaciously dissonant one moment, tenderly introspective the next.

It is also amenable to inflection from the podium. Boulez shaped it with sure hands, producing--introducing?--a palpable if unpredictable sense of direction in the giddy affair. His somber demeanor was anti-charismatic--a professional working for the musicians’ benefit, not the audience’s--but his results were electrifying.

Boulez paired “Formazioni” with Bartok’s “A Kekszakallu Herceg Vara,” a.k.a. “Bluebeard’s Castle,” which was not as quixotic a deed as might be imagined, since he treated the one-act opera essentially as a tone-poem.

On those terms the effort was truly heroic, in ambition and achievement. The voluptuous pictorialism of the score was thoroughly exploited in a well-balanced symphonic essay.

The singers, however, frequently found themselves buried in the glittering orchestral work. Mezzo Susan Quittmeyer and, particularly, Hungarian bass Laszlo Polgar made ample and attractive sounds of their own, but in some climaxes proved nearly inaudible. When allowed by Boulez and orchestra, they provided secure, resonant singing, alert to the unusual and wide-ranging demands of Bartok’s prosody.

Interpretively, neither singer challenged the orchestra for dramatic or narrative supremacy. Both stressed the fatalistic elements of the libretto in almost matter-of-fact reactions, underscoring the chill sense of doom in the work, but robbing it of much of its passion and leaving some of the massive orchestral strokes without a context.

For Boulez as well, this seemed ultimately a very cold interpretation, leaden and fated in spirit. He appeared more concerned with clarity of texture and precision of rhythm than with emotional statements or psychological probing.

Gail Eichenthal read the minstrel’s brief rhetorical introduction to the tale in English.