Boulez Weathers the Storm

Dusted by snow flurries Sunday afternoon, Walter Cronkite stood in the front of the stage door of Carnegie Hall speaking to a television camera. He was on his way to hear Pierre Boulez conduct the Vienna Philharmonic in Mahler’s Third Symphony. His remarks couldn’t be overheard, but perhaps he was asked to comment on what promised to be a bizarre musico-climatological phenomenon.

New York was braced for what Cronkite’s news-broadcasting successors were heralding as an impending blizzard of historic proportions. The mayor was poised to command his indomitable phalanxes of snow plows. Meanwhile, inside New York’s ever gracious, warmly inviting palace of music, a calm, utterly authoritative Boulez would marshal one of history’s great collections of musicians to confront a scene of winter like no other. Mahler’s momentous 95-minute symphony evokes grotesque, unforgettable nature with, in Deryck Cooke’s words, “brayings of horns,” “shrieks on woodwinds” and “gross, uncouth trombone themes, like monstrous prehistoric voices,” which the program notes gleefully quoted.

Mahler’s storm ushers out winter, leaving in its place an ecstatic dream of summery heaven. A final adagio is a rapturous, transcendent hymn of thanksgiving. Did a magnificent performance of this symphony forestall the nor’easter of the ages? Certainly by Monday morning, nothing much had come of it. Given all the meteorological hysteria, one explanation seems about meaningful as the next. And given New York’s appetite for hype, it also helps put the Boulez-Vienna Philharmonic partnership in perspective. The three concerts over the weekend by the world’s most celebrated traditionalist orchestra and modernist conductor were also anticipated as a historic phenomenon.

Boulez and the Vienna Philharmonic do seem an astonishing collaboration. No mainstream conductor has done more for modern music than Boulez, who is also one of the most important progressive composers of the past 50 years. And no important orchestra has tried as adamantly as the Vienna Philharmonic to repress the 20th century--the latest news on the orchestra front is that this once-exclusive men’s club has finally hired its second woman, a violist who begins next year.

Another way to look at it is to imagine an American president, whose politics are left of Ralph Nader, persuading a Senate, with a membership that mostly leaned to John Ashcroft’s right, to unanimously support him.

In fact, the collaboration, remarkable as it is, is not quite that extreme. The players manage themselves, which means it is they who invited Boulez to conduct them, and the real attraction may be the simple recognition of excellence on both sides. But it does seem that the orchestra has slowly begun to catch up with modern times.

Mahler’s symphony was given the most impressive performance of the weekend, but, in a way, the other two programs--Friday night was devoted to early 20th century classics; Saturday to Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony--were more interesting. The 20th century program began with works by Bartok, Webern and Debussy that were written just before World War I, and concluded with Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, which was composed in 1945 in Los Angeles as a response to World War II.

Bartok’s Four Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 12, and Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 6, are transitional early pieces, among the first works in which the composers’ distinctively modern voices emerge out of a Romantic tradition. And they were treated to glorious performances, with the Viennese players sensitive to the most exquisite gradations of color and expressivity. Boulez, meanwhile, made sure that every detail was clearly revealed. But although they also played Debussy’s “Jeux” very beautifully, they did not do so with the rapid-fire response necessary to capture ever-changeable character of music with no readily appreciable form. The orchestra might consider an exercise regime for its schlag-clogged arteries, because it was also rhythmically challenged by Stravinsky, unless it was Stravinsky’s musical evocation of scorched-earth tactics that made the players uncomfortable.

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Although Boulez has often criticized the Neoclassical Stravinsky of this period, he was his usual demanding self, and the players responded as if glued to the page. Still, the stiff performance, which was part of an ongoing Stravinsky festival at Carnegie, did demonstrate that Stravinsky’s influence may not be pervasive everywhere.

Bruckner is a composer with whom the Vienna Philharmonic is very at home, as it is with Wagner’s Prelude and “Love-Death” from “Tristan and Isolde,” which preceded the symphony. Here Boulez butted against Viennese tradition. The Wagner was clean, still and luminous, sounding much the way the Debussy should have. In the Scherzo of Bruckner’s Ninth, Boulez achieved exactly the rhythmic punch he was looking for in the Stravinsky.

Elsewhere in the symphony, Boulez let it be known that Bruckner was a harmonic adventurer, making sure that chords were balanced in such a way that the dissonances were much more strongly felt than usual. He also reveled in Bruckner’s sonic individuality, especially in the way he brought out winds, allowing them to strikingly pierce through the heavy (and glorious) brass.

For the Mahler Third, the orchestra was ideal. The playing had raw power and a lustrous brilliance. Boulez led a very tight and thrilling performance. Violeta Urmana was the luscious mezzo-soprano soloist in the fourth movement, the women of the New York Choral Artists and the American Boychoir sang splendidly in the fifth.

New Yorkers, who regularly accused Boulez of being a cold fish when he was music director of their Philharmonic a quarter-century ago, gave him rapturous waves of ovations. But New York being New York, there always has to be something to gripe about. People walked out into the few snow sprinkles grumbling about the weather not living up to the hype, and one man complained that Boulez’s Mahler was not Jewish enough.