A Dazzling Boulez Birthday Celebration

Throughout the entire second half of the 20th century, Pierre Boulez has been one of the world’s most dazzling musical figures. In March, the French composer and conductor turned 75, and he is entering the 21st century, the dazzle in tact.

Boulez will not find his way to the West Coast this year (Ojai, 2003, is his next local date thus far announced). But the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group (which Boulez last conducted four years ago) celebrated his birthday the best way it could. It played the West Coast premiere of his latest major score, “sur Incises,” his most dazzling music yet, Monday night in the Japan America Theatre at its last Green Umbrella concert of the season.

For sheer brilliance of sound, there is nothing to compare with “sur Incises,” which is written for the glittery ensemble of three harps, three pianos and three percussionists playing two vibraphones and marimba, along with glockenspiel, timbales, bells and steel drums. The score itself is the product of mental hyperactivity. Its title suggests that it is a work “around” “Incises,” a short explosive solo piano piece Boulez wrote in 1994. But more than “around” it, “sur Incises” shatters its namesake; the shards of the piano piece now erupt like a fireworks display. The sonorities are ever-changing metallic resonances broken up by those bursts, which are as distinct as events in nature. We recognize that the gestures are somehow related, but the complexity makes them ever changing. There is a scene in Jean Cocteau’s 1932 film, “The Birth of a Poet,” in which the poet falls through a full-length mirror. The mirror is a passageway; it breaks, becoming a splash of water, and the poet enters into another world. A performance of “sur Incises” feels as if shining metal likewise turns liquid in an instant, with everything familiar transformed--only that instant stretches into a mind-bending 35 minutes.

Few of us can actually follow the logic of this music, but, like imaginative science, it fascinates nonetheless. I’ve sat through two performances of “sur Incises”--one in Carnegie Hall with Boulez conducting the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and Monday’s, led by German conductor Markus Stenz. In both cases, a good-sized audience listened enthralled. There is nothing so appealing as being in the presence of a great mind, and that is exactly the impression Boulez’s music gives.

This New Music Group ensemble (which had but one Philharmonic member, harpist Lou Anne Neill) was a virtuosic one, with a number of experienced Boulezians, but it was also a worried one. There was not the acrobatic dynamism, the sense that every gesture was a musical sleight of hand, an act of astonishment, that Boulez can achieve when he conducts this music. But Stenz was a solid leader, and he presented a good idea of the kind of delights this music holds.

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The program opened by introducing Los Angeles to a composer with an unusual connection to Boulez. For the past 15 years, Brett Dean has also been a violist for the Berlin Philharmonic, which Boulez conducts. Dean is a terrific violist, as his performance of his solo piece, “Intimate Decisions,” revealed. He is also a terrific composer, good enough that he is now leaving the Berlin orchestra to devote himself to writing music and some solo work. The other Dean piece on the program was “Carlo” for strings, sampler and tape, based on the music of madrigalist Carlo Gesualdo. Both works are from the last three or four years.

In the solo piece, Dean, who is Australian, obsessed over a few tiny melodic cells that did in fact seem like intimate decisions, a mind circling around itself to get at something big. The end was a spectacular fade-out in harmonics. “Carlo” is lyrical and theatrical, made sonically lively by the glitz of prerecorded and altered Gesualdo quotes blending in. Dean writes beautifully for strings, and the performance by Philharmonic string players and Gloria Cheng operating the sampler keyboard, led by Stenz, had a magical glow.