Unleashing Stravinsky’s Fire Power

Pierre Boulez has long been France’s most important musician. As a composer, his has been the modernist’s mission, advancing the language of music, exploring new sounds, new gestures and new structures. And his influence on musical composition is an inescapable part of the history of music in the second half of the 20th century.

As a conductor, Boulez has seen his international reputation rise from one of respect to, in recent years, adulation. He is, in the 20th century repertory he favors, the undisputed master. Now, after the deaths of Bernstein and Karajan, he is arguably the world’s most renowned conductor.

To Parisians, Boulez, even with his many detractors, is simply an icon. He created IRCAM, the new music institute as part of the popular modern art museum, the Pompidou Center. He formed the Ensemble Intercontemporain, a sterling new music chamber orchestra. More recently he helped make possible the imaginative state-of-the-art Cite de la Musique, an ambitious concert hall and public music resource center unlike any in the world.

So the fact that Boulez agreed to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Cha^telet Theater Friday night, as part of the orchestra’s two-week residency here and the theater’s ongoing Stravinsky festival, is, in Parisian musical life, a considerable honor.

But it proved to be something more--an occasion. Parisians don’t actually get to hear Boulez conduct an orchestra of the caliber of the Los Angeles Philharmonic very often. Despite the many great orchestrators among French composers--including Rameau, Berlioz, Debussy, Ravel, Messiaen and Boulez, himself--France has never been known for its orchestras.

There was, consequently, considerable significance to this concert. Boulez, who has had his ups and downs in Paris and New York, has shown devotion to Los Angeles, where he has been going regularly for four decades. He had some of his most important early American successes at the long-running series called Monday Evening Concerts. He first conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1969. And he made his American comeback, following a troubled tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic in the ‘70s, in Los Angeles in the ‘80s.

Boulez has had his ups and downs with Stravinsky as well. He was always a great admirer of the revolutionary early Stravinsky, but found Stravinsky’s retreat into neo-classicism in the ‘30s a failure of nerve. By the time Stravinsky began returning to modernism in the ‘50s, Boulez was already a force and far ahead of him.

All of that baggage made for the complicated look at Stravinsky that Boulez presented to Paris. The conductor included both late Stravinsky--from the time when Boulez used to visit the composer in Los Angeles--and “The Firebird,” the 1911 ballet that was not only Stravinsky’s first Parisian success following his emigration from St. Petersburg but also has remained his best loved score here and everywhere else.

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Much of the concert was extraordinary, with the Philharmonic performing at its best, but only after it got past the opening work, “Agon.” Stravinsky’s mid-’50s ballet score is a somewhat awkward if often gorgeous attempt to reconcile his love for classical culture (he was just getting over neo-classicism) and the newer 12-tone tendencies in music (which Boulez was so avidly propounding at the time). The score inspired a beautiful ballet by Balanchine, but Boulez has never seemed to warm to it. The Philharmonic, while admirably transparent, also sounded unconfident here, with Boulez’s indifferent direction.

But the playing in the six-minute Variations, “Aldous Huxley in Memoriam,” from 1964, was jewel-like and precise. Boulez laid out the delicate score out with exquisite care. This was a nice programming touch, since it was Huxley who had suggested W.H. Auden to Stravinsky as librettist for “The Rake’s Progress,” which the Philharmonic is currently performing here to great acclaim.

An equally nice touch was featuring four Philharmonic players in Three Pieces for String Quartet, followed by Four Etudes for Orchestra, which includes an orchestration of the quartet pieces. This is just the kind of thing Boulez as a composer likes to do--take early solo or chamber pieces and amplify them orchestrally. They were well played by the Philharmonic quartet, but burst into glorious Technicolor with the orchestra.

Now playing with confidence, the Philharmonic gave one of its great performances in “The Firebird.” Unlike a higher-powered performance I heard Boulez conduct of this score with the Chicago Symphony two years ago, this was one of wondrous nuance. The sound was rich and refined throughout the orchestra, making the music seem as complex and variegated as Boulez’s own scores while still radiating early Stravinsky’s lyricism. In the illuminating acoustic of the Cha^telet, the music glowed as it sadly cannot in the duller Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Backstage afterward, Boulez is reported to have said how pleased he was to show Parisians what a really good orchestra sounds like. The reporter was the hardly unbiased managing director of the Philharmonic, Ernest Fleischmann. But Boulez, in fact, did just that.