A Native Son Returns--a Leader

Despite its lingering reputation as fringe cultural territory, Los Angeles has played an important role in the landscape of 20th century music. It has been a landing zone for iconic composers of Stravinsky and Schoenberg’s ilk, and a place where new music has always found a performance home. And then there are the Angelenos who have dispersed into the world, establishing themselves elsewhere: The most notable export, perhaps, is John Cage, and among the living, Santa Monica-born and -bred conductor David Robertson.

For the past eight years, Robertson, 40, has led the Paris-based Ensemble Intercontemporain, one of the most respected contemporary music ensembles in the world. Robertson went abroad to study at the London Academy of Music before the age of 20, and never came back.

His career has been cemented across the Atlantic as a conductor with ears wide open, interpreting and championing contemporary work without turning away from standard, cross-historical repertoire. Last season, for instance, he conducted both the world premiere of Luciano Berio’s “Outis” in Milan and made his San Francisco Opera debut with a new production of “Rigoletto.” “There are some people,” he says, “who don’t need both, and there are those who do, for whom the cross-fertilization is what makes it all click.”

When Robertson leads the Ensemble Intercontemporain at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall this afternoon, it will be his local professional debut and the first U.S. tour for the ensemble since its founding director, Pierre Boulez, handed him the baton in 1991. In fact, Robertson arrives here in the twilight of his tenure in Paris. Beginning in the fall of 2000, he’ll give up his post with the ensemble and become head of the Orchestre de Lyon. His guest-conducting work continues to expand westward, and he has been invited to lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic next fall.

Most of Robertson’s musical evolution has occurred in his post-California life. He initially studied French horn and composition at London’s Royal Academy of Music, eventually settling on conducting. He led the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra from 1985 to 1987, guest-conducted a long list of European orchestras and found himself a regular in the opera world.

Although his parents have passed away and his direct link to the Southland has diminished, Robertson is looking forward to revisiting the city of his formative years.

“Of course, there are such strong memories connected with things there,” Robertson said, in a phone interview from Lyon, where he was making arrangements for his forthcoming orchestral assignment. “I remember going to the library at UCLA and seeing all of the scores that they have, and wanting to bring my sleeping bag and camp out there. So to go and play at UCLA is going to be a big thing, from a personal point of view.” He laughed. “But I’m supposed to be way too cool and not gush like that. Still, it’s hard not to.”

A strong link also exists between the ensemble and UCLA. When Boulez was the group’s active head, its appearances on campus included a memorable 1986 performance. There, Boulez’s ambitious, electro-acoustic spatial piece “Repons” was staged on a basketball court, with musicians on platforms situated around the audience.

As always, this ensemble, more than most any other in the world, has embraced the interface of electro-acoustic music, a still-experimental world in which conventional instruments are combined with sounds made via circuits and computer programming. It’s a natural side effect of an affiliation with the electronic music think tank known as IRCAM (Insitut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique Musique), formed in 1976 and headed by Boulez, who remains its president. The work nurtured at IRCAM tends toward atonal or post-serial writing, as with Boulez’s scores, or toward an emphasis on texture and process over melodic logic.

Ironically, at the time he was brought on board, Robertson’s reputation was leaning more toward the opera world than the domain of new music. He had just done a high-profile tour with Marilyn Horne and had scored kudos for his work conducting operas by Rossini, Mozart and Bellini.

“All these people said, ‘But he’s a bel canto specialist. How is he going to be able to conduct all those strange time signatures?’ ” Robertson said. “I’m happy that I do have the opportunity to do both things.”

And it wasn’t just the technical confines of electro-acoustic music that made observers doubt his fit with the organization. There was also a notion that IRCAM-style music was so mechanical, passionless and abstract that it wouldn’t be open to the kind of expressive insights Robertson was known for in his other work.

“When I arrived, journalists said, ‘Why are you involved in this repertoire? There is no interpretation involved.’ I was shocked. It doesn’t matter how accurately a composer notates something; the fact that we’re all subjective individuals means that it will change.

“Look at Flaubert. Nobody can describe with more accuracy or precision than Flaubert. [But] can you find two people who think exactly the same about how Madame Bovary looks? That’s something everybody knows when they have a book they really loved and then they see a film version of it. Yet to somehow say this is not going to happen when two people play a work of Elliott Carter seems to me very strange.”

At UCLA, the group will perform Boulez’s “Derives 2 & 1,” Carter’s Clarinet Concerto, Phillippe Hurel’s “Six Miniatures” and Unsuk Chin’s “Xi,” in which the electro-acoustic aspect is key. As Robertson noted, his players have had “almost 25 years of experience with the most advanced aspects of blending acoustic and electro-acoustic music. It means you can work with very fine shadings of things in a way you can’t with other groups.”

By now, the ensemble’s library of music is huge, involving 1,400 works, many of which were world premieres and commissions. Being the custodian of all that music is one thing Robertson won’t miss once he leaves the ensemble.

“Any time I program a composer,” he said, “I’m aware of a hundred other composers I’m not programming. That gets very heavy. If I could be music director and not have that to deal with, I’d be doing it for another 20 years. The joy of conducting the group is so enormous.

“I say this half as a joke--and you can decide which half--but all the musicians are more talented than I am, which is a wonderfully sobering thing for a conductor. I’m very much of a collaborator, and the idea of working with a whole group of soloists is something that I really enjoy. Now, when I go to a symphony orchestra, I try to instill the same [idea].”

As the 20th century slips away, groups such as the Ensemble Intercontemporain--grounded in music of this century--face the redefinition, or at least the reconsideration of their agenda, now armed with the wisdom of hindsight. For Robertson, the sweeping and sometimes controversial evolution of concert music has reflected its time--one reason new music isn’t always appreciated in its historical moment.

“Things that have happened in the 20th century--on the human the sociological and the economic levels--have yet to be digested. One thing that makes contemporary art difficult is that contemporary artists are dealing precisely with these things. We’re [all] thinking, ‘[Things are] so strange, how is this possible?’ When a contemporary artist puts that into a piece of music, it’s not unusual that people might say, ‘I don’t really get that,’ because you can barely get certain aspects of life once you leave your own circumscribed environment.”

Robertson’s advancing career is, in some sense, neatly synchronized with his own maturation process. Though he lives with his German wife and two children in Frankfurt, he is appearing more and more on American soil, and he won the 1997 Seaver/NEA Conductor’s Award, with its prize of $50,000.

Last summer, he made his conducting debut with the Cleveland Orchestra, two days after his 40th birthday. “It was really nice because I felt like this was the realization of a dream that I had when I was growing up, being able to conduct an orchestra like this. Yet, at the same time, I felt that I had something to say, so I wasn’t there prematurely.

“I feel that that is very important, to try and make sure we’re at the stage where we can always bring something and give something.”

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DAVID ROBERTSON AND THE ENSEMBLE INTERCONTEMPORAIN, Schoenberg Hall, UCLA campus, Westwood. Date: Today, 4 p.m. Prices: $11 to $30. Phone: (310) 825-2101.