Boulez, the Mellow Years : Pierre Boulez was once a feared composer-conductor, but today he is a gracious, witty conductor who is considerate toward his musicians and still passionate about having contemporary music in people’s lives

The scene at the PolyGram post-Grammy party a few weeks ago was unprecedented. An exuberant young staff member of the once-stuffy German classical music label Deutsche Grammophon was literally shouting the news from the rafters and inviting revelers to party.

Pierre Boulez’s recording, with the Chicago Symphony, of Bartok’s seldom-played early ballet score “The Wooden Prince” and his even less-known choral work “Cantata Profana,” had won Grammys for best classical recording, best orchestral recording, best choral recording and best engineered recording. If one were to equate the classical music Grammy Awards to Oscars, this grand slam makes Boulez the equivalent of Steven Spielberg and Jane Campion rolled into one.

But, ironically, the notable achievement for Boulez is that no one in classical music, except perhaps fidgety marketing executives, really takes the Grammys very seriously. They are not sophisticated awards. They generally go to big names, to potboiler releases or to sonic blockbusters. So what all the shouting was about was that Boulez--the rigorous modernist leader of the European total serialism movement in the ‘50s and composer of probably the most formidable music to actually enter into the fringes of the repertory--was no longer scary and had even developed some mass-market appeal.

Angelenos, of course, knew this long before the rest of the country caught up with the new Boulez, 69, and his appearances at the Music Center this week and next would probably have been eagerly awaited with or without the Grammys.

When he began biannual visits to the Los Angeles Philharmonic a decade ago, his American profile was low and his reputation was that of a new-music ogre. At that time he was still remembered as “The French Correction” of the New York Philharmonic, the audience-unfriendly disciplinarian who followed Leonard Bernstein as its music director. He was feared as the tyrant of French music and something of a mad musical scientist who had become the head of IRCAM, the Space Age computer-music facility in Paris he created after leaving the New York Philharmonic. Furthermore, the complexly organized music he wrote had gone completely out of fashion once Minimalism and New Romanticism had begun to dominate American music.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic found, instead, a musician nearly the opposite of his reputation. He turned out to be a gracious, witty, supporting, elegant conductor with an uncanny knack for making the most difficult music seem, if not exactly easy, at least natural.

Maybe the biggest surprise of all was that Boulez proved to be uncommonly considerate toward the players. He is relaxed when conducting, because, he says, a tense conductor makes the players tense. “If you don’t care for them, they won’t care for you,” he advised a young conductor more wrapped up in his manner than in the players during a conducting workshop at Carnegie Hall last year.

Los Angeles no longer has Boulez exclusively in America. He now spends a month each year with the Chicago Symphony and two or three weeks with the Cleveland Orchestra. For the past three seasons he has also led special workshops in conducting or composing at Carnegie Hall. And everywhere the story is the same, with Boulez seeming to win over everyone with whom he comes into contact.

Earlier this season in Chicago, for instance, scalpers were carrying on a brisk business the day after Thanksgiving for Boulez’s performance of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. The previous season Boulez appeared with the Cleveland Orchestra at Carnegie Hall for the kind of 20th-Century program that had so annoyed New Yorkers when he was music director of the New York Philharmonic, and got a hero’s welcome.

So dazzled and surprised was that audience that for one of the rare times in recent memory there wasn’t that typical New Yorker rush up the aisles at the final downbeat (or earlier) to be the first to get a cab or to avoid the long lines at the parking garage.

And now the Grammys.

Boulez himself takes all of this new-found popularity and adulation in stride. Reached by phone recently at his home in Paris, Boulez laughed at the irony of his winning all those Grammys. “I am not personally proud about this,” he said, “but I am happy because it helps this music to be much more known than it is. If many people hear, for the first time, either ‘The Wooden Prince’ or the ‘Cantata Profana,’ then that is a good result.” He is also predictably pleased that this will perhaps help egg on Deutsche Grammophon, which has undertaken an extensive recording project of 20th-Century works with Boulez conducting several major orchestras, into unchartered repertory.

Boulez, however, attributes his recent success to the fact that he has always worked hard to obtain the right conditions for making music, and by this point in his career he has achieved them. He no longer is an administrator, having resigned both as head of IRCAM and as president of the Ensemble InterContemporain, the group he helped found in 1975, although he remains active in both institutions. He only conducts part time, 10 to 12 weeks a year, and then with just a handful of orchestras.

He goes to Chicago, because he developed a close relationship with its music director, Daniel Barenboim, when Barenboim led L’Orchestre de Paris. Likewise he comes to Los Angeles because of his longstanding friendship with L.A. Philharmonic Managing Director Ernest Fleischmann. He has begun returning annually to Cleveland because it is the first American orchestra with which he became associated, in the ‘60s. He conducts the Berlin and Vienna philharmonics because, well, who wouldn’t?

But mainly, Boulez says, he only goes where he can spend two weeks or, preferably, more, so that he can develop a relationship with the players. He also goes where circumstances allow him to perform the music he cares about. Berlin, for instance, is willing to sponsor a Webern festival for Boulez, who will then record the composer’s complete works with its orchestra. “I don’t want to make a concert just for the sake of making concerts. That does not interest me. But when there is an artistic goal, that is more satisfying.”

Another, for instance, is Boulez’s upcoming two weeks in Los Angeles, where he will perform his “Le Visage Nuptial,” an ambitious and demanding song cycle for soloists, chorus and orchestra that cannot be properly prepared in the standard rehearsal time. “But because I am in Los Angeles for two weeks, I can rehearse it for two weeks,” Boulez said. “I can make an easy program for the first week, and therefore can have more time to rehearse (“Le Visage Nuptial”) for the second program.” (This week’s “easy” program is maybe an understatement, since it includes Bartok’s sweeping and terrifying ballet score “The Miraculous Mandarin,” but Boulez has conducted the orchestra in it before.)

Nothing, moreover, better typifies Boulez than “Le Visage Nuptial” and his programming it. For all his new-found popularity, Boulez is still not exactly a beloved composer by the general public, which would be happiest if he stuck to the early 20th-Century hits by Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky and Bartok.

For all the success he had with his Cleveland Orchestra concert at Carnegie Hall last season, Boulez got a much cooler response this season when he led the Ensemble InterContemporain in the American premiere of the latest version of his “ . . . explosante / fixe . . . “ --a 35-minute work for solo flute and ensemble, electronically expanding the flute sounds instantaneously as it is played by utilizing the latest computer hardware and software from IRCAM. It is a rich, intricate, subtle, sensual score, but not one easily apprehended in first hearing. The audience dwindled appreciably throughout the concert.

Still Boulez--like Mahler, who was adulated as a conductor but certainly not as a composer by his audiences--is a composer first and performer second. And, as with conducting, Boulez the composer has had to fight against his reputation for exerting calculated control over every aspect of the music. Indeed, Boulez’s polemical domination of ‘50s serialism, in which every element of the music was mathematically predetermined, proved a technique so ferocious that he himself eventually came to call it totalitarian rather than total serialism.

But Boulez’s music has become freer in recent years, and many of his orchestra and short chamber works have found much favor. “Notations I-IV,” orchestral expansions of four student piano studies, has found favor with orchestras everywhere, including in Los Angeles. But even his most rigidly structured early music, with its textures as arresting as ever-changing intricate computer imagery of fractal patterns, can seem beautiful when brilliantly played.

Boulez is also as stubborn a composer as he is a conductor--maybe more so. In both personifications he will not rest until he gets it right, which in conducting maybe means a little extra rehearsal, while for a work like “Le Visage Nuptial” it has meant waiting 40 years.

“Le Visage Nuptial,” in fact, is one of the most illuminating examples of Boulez’s artistic personality. It is based upon an extraordinary erotic poem by Rene Char, the French surrealist poet. Boulez describes it as an unusually narrative poem written by Char, one of the French poets of our century he most admires and with whom he became friends. “The story is very simple. The beginning of love. The climax is in the middle. Then at the end, the disenchantment and farewell.” The language, however, is anything but simple. The imagery is often erotic and violent, with narrative events only implied, nothing ever spelled out.

The circumstances of its original composition in 1946 are unclear. Joan Peyser, in her 1976 biography of Boulez, implies a mysterious love affair and a suicide pact. Boulez has never spoken of it. But the Boulez of that period was clearly high-strung, subject to extreme emotions that for a long time went unrecognized in his formally predetermined music.

In fact, Boulez’s description of “Le Visage Nuptial” closely parallels his artistic friendship with John Cage a few years later, which is traced in the correspondence between the two composers recently published by Cambridge University Press. Boulez met Cage in Paris in 1949, was enchanted, and struck up an immediate friendship with the composer, who was 13 years his senior and already well known. After Cage returned to New York, an excited correspondence between the two began, with both breathlessly exchanging their ideas about the employment of chance in composition. When he finally visited Cage in New York in 1952, however, he found that Cage had moved in the direction of anarchy. Disenchantment set in, and Boulez rapidly and unsentimentally ended the correspondence.

“When I put it on paper in 1946,” Boulez recalled of the original version of “Le Visage Nuptial,” “that was just for a small combination of one voice and four instruments. Going back to this in 1953, I thought it needs a bigger body of sound to express what I want. But when I did it, I was in a very austere phase. I forced the score into a kind of straitjacket. I was very inexperienced in orchestration. At the same time I was very dogmatic: ‘I want to do this; I want to do that.’ And finally it was not possible to realize it correctly.”

When Boulez first conducted the orchestral score in 1957 in Cologne, Germany, it also happened to be the first time he had faced a large orchestra. While the reviews spoke of a born conductor, Boulez thought something was very wrong but he says he was too inexperienced to tell if the problem was him as a conductor or composer. When he conducted it again many years later, in the late ‘70s in Paris, he knew.

“I stopped after one rehearsal,” he explains. “I thought, ‘No, that’s not possible, I must write it again.’ With the freedom I had acquired and the experience through conducting, I went back to it with less austerity, and on the contrary I expanded the work quite a lot. But it retains exactly the same frame of action.”

The final form of “Le Visage Nuptial” is more complex, more elaborate, “definitely, definitely more sensual,” and less violent, which pretty much characterizes Boulez today. He doesn’t revert to polemics much anymore because, he says, he doesn’t have to. He is not outside shouting to get in. He is the Establishment. Boulez feels that it is not what he wants that has changed, only that years of experience as a composer and conductor and administrator have taught him how to get it.

But experience has not made writing music any faster or easier for Boulez. Among his many projects are finishing the final sections of “ . . . explosante / fixe . . . “ --another piece that has been years evolving for years. He has missed several deadlines for the next set of “Notations,” though he promises they will be ready for Chicago, which has programmed a number of Boulez works to celebrate his birthday next season. He has also promised to write an opera, to a libretto by the experimental German playwright Heiner Muller, for Daniel Barenboim to conduct in Berlin.

Nor has Boulez lost any of his vision for the future. He maintains close contact with IRCAM and employs its latest technology. He has hand-picked the new music director of the Ensemble InterContemporain, David Robertson, a young conductor from Malibu, who is little known in the United States. He is involved with a new campus of the Paris Conservatory, where the Ensemble InterContemporain will be in residence and where he is working with architects and acousticians on a new modular concert hall.

And, as he has done all his life, he is lobbying for contemporary music to be a more integral part of contemporary life and thought. He complains that modern concert halls are old-fashioned, unchanged throughout his lifetime. He wants them more like museums, open long hours, full of resources--books, scores, records, tapes. He is lobbying for the development of interactive CD-ROMs about contemporary music. He is always listening and glad to conduct new works that interest him.

He now pays particular attention to French composers between the ages of 35 and 45.

“They interest me because theirs is a very different approach from my generation. Maybe it is less didactic than we had at their age, therefore it’s interesting to look at the way they react. For instance, with some people I have almost 40 years difference. That’s like me with Stravinsky, approximately 40 years difference, two generations. If I am interested I conduct them.”

And that is one more thing that has not changed over the years with Boulez--his love for the word interesting. Maybe what he finds interesting has changed, but the word has been, and remains, his highest compliment.

* Pierre Boulez will conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., next Sunday at 2:30, April 28-30 at 8 p.m. and May 1 at 2:30. He also will give an open rehearsal Thursday at 10 a.m. For information, call (213) 850-2000.