Boulez Is Back in L.A., His Mission Still Intact

Pierre Boulez, one of the great composers of our time, has been building audiences locally since he began conducting here in the 1950s.

Indeed, he comes regularly to and has a long relationship with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which is closing out its current season with Boulez leading two sets of concerts this weekend and next.

Boulez also has a long-term relationship with the Ojai Festival, where he will be conducting the Philharmonic on the occasion of the summer series’ 50th anniversary at the end of this month.

Meanwhile, while he is here, the Southwest Chamber Music Society will also be playing his reputation breakthrough piece--”Le Marteau san Mai^tre,” which received its U.S. premiere in Los Angeles in 1957--in Pasadena and Santa Monica.

“He has a terrific following, particularly among younger audiences,” says Philharmonic managing director Ernest Fleischmann. “Some of the more conservative or traditional audiences get a little worried sometimes, but I would ask them to keep their ears and minds wide open.”

“He is such a draw personally, no matter what he’s conducting,” says Joan Kemper, executive director of the Ojai Festival. “He gets a lot from the orchestra and the audience. He’s tremendous.”

Jeff von der Schmidt of the Southwest Chamber Society says the weeks of rehearsal leading up to the group’s performances have been “a labor of love for everybody. But we’re past the difficulties now. It’s inspiring and beautiful music to play.”

Philharmonic musicians generally speak of Boulez with a mixture of warm admiration and awe of his musicianship.

“You have to know your stuff before you go into him,” clarinetist David Howard says. “Is it true he can hear everything? Yes. But the thing is, he is always a gentleman about it. I have never seen a hint of an antagonistic character.”

Percussionist William Kraft, who first worked with Boulez on the American premiere of “Le Marteau,” recalls their first encounter. “We had already practiced 60 hours with [conductor] Robert Craft. He gave up. That was on a Friday. Pierre came in Saturday morning. In the rehearsals, the corrections he made were demonstrations. He would solfege [sing] our parts which we thought were impossible!”

Boulez’s music, trombonist Byron Peebles explains, is “very tight, very well-crafted, very concentrated” and the composer will divide the orchestra into smaller groups to rehearse it.

“He will literally rehearse 12 hours a day,” Peebles says. “He can stand there and be clear-headed, cool and collected. His energy is quite extraordinary.”

“The best way to listen to his music is not to try to figure it out,” violinist Camille Avellano says. “Let it wash over you. If you try to analyze it, you’ll find that he’s way ahead of you. There’s no way you’ll catch up. Just let it wash over you and have a visceral reaction.”

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Boulez says he is very concerned about his audiences’ reactions, too.

“My life is proof that I’m very worried about audiences,” he says. “I would not have given all this time to institutions if I were not very interested in getting audiences to listen to contemporary music. But that depends on the organizations, the institutions.”

Those he likes to work with must meet two conditions. “First, you must have regularity--institutions that give a certain number of these concerts,” he says. “People can attend these events, get accustomed to the music, become more knowledgeable about it and listen with more accurate perception.

“Second, the quality should be as high as possible, all the time. It’s a big mistake to play contemporary music without sufficient rehearsals, with the appearance always on the verge of distaste. This kind of insecurity goes to the audience, which says, ‘What is the point?’

“You can convince people only with a feeling of quality and competence. If people give lip service to playing contemporary music, then of course that’s the worst kind of attitude.”

With the Philharmonic at the Music Center and at Ojai, he’ll be conducting his own works and music by Stravinsky, Bartok, Ravel and others, including the U.S. premiere of Harrison Birdwistle’s “Antiphonies,” a work jointly commissioned by local arts patron Betty Freeman and Vincent Meyer, president of the Philharmonic Orchestra in London.

And this will be his last visit here until at least 1999, he says, because he’s taking a yearlong sabbatical from all his duties in 1997 “to work on my pieces.”

He is, as it turns out, continually revising his own music. At the Japan America Theatre on May 28, he will lead the West Coast premiere of a new version of “ . . . explosante-fixe. . . . “ Why a new version?

“We were all asked to write a small piece after the death of Stravinsky,” he says. “I gave it a first approach [in 1971]. Then I tried to make something of it with the technology of the time. But because the technology at that time was so primitive, it was not satisfying at all. Now technology has made enormous progress.

“If you have musical material, musical ideas which are not really worked out properly, you try to do the proper job with the proper materials. You don’t leave something behind, something unaccomplished, if you have the proper solution.”