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CONDUCTING THE BERLIN
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The 2003 concert took place in the 16th-century Mosterio dos Jerónimos in Lisbon, a fabulously ornate monastery testifying to Portugal's status as a superpower in the age of exploration. At the podium was Pierre Boulez, which is significant because, besides being a prominent conductor, he is also a pivotal figure in Europe's cultural modernity.
Boulez came of age in the early 1950s, along with a generation of composers whose response to the artistic rubble of World War II was to dynamite tradition. "The most elegant way of solving the opera problem would be to blow up the opera houses," Boulez declared while he was still in his 20s. He didn't do that, but he did spearhead an implacably modernist movement dedicated to rebuilding a European patrimony untainted by war.
Though he acquired an early reputation as an agitator, he eventually proved to be much more of a constructive force and conservator of the past. Instead of razing opera houses, he brought them benchmark performances of works by Wagner, Debussy, and Berg. Rather than demolish institutions, he invented new ones and tried to transform the old. As a composer, he has been relentlessly original, but he has also absorbed a surprisingly wide range of influences. He cites the fluid pulse and flowing forms of Debussy, the sparkling orchestral colors of Ravel, the rhythmic vitality of Stravinsky, the meticulously arranged clangor of Var&eagrave;se, the dramatic vividness of Messiaen, and the structural elegance of Bartók.
As a conductor, he has made stinging brilliance the standard for performance of 20th-century music, and his own music demands no less. "The clarity, the transparency, the careful balancing of chords so that you hear everything -- that's the composer speaking in Boulez the conductor," Daniel Barenboim, music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and one of a few colleagues who conducts Boulez's works regularly, once told me. "You feel the bones, the anatomy of the piece."
By now, Boulez is an elder of the musical world, and the orchestras he conducts have been tempered by his exacting style. Aficionados who watch this broadcast and expect to see him massaging the air with his efficient fingers (he never uses a baton), slicing accents with a palm, and plucking solos from the ether may be surprised to observe him waving rather blandly. That is evidence not of sloppiness or indifference but of the depth of his influence. Bartók's 1942 "Concerto for Orchestra," a work as radical as it was seminal when Boulez first began to champion it, has entered the canon of masterworks, and Boulez's own scores, too, have become classics of complexity. He is 78 now, and the young musicians who populate the world's great orchestras have internalized his demand for clear articulation and absorbed his rhythmic exactitude. When it comes to Bartók's "Concerto for Orchestra," he need only mount the podium for the orchestra to know exactly what he wants. And when it comes to Mozart's D-minor "Piano Concerto" -- not one of his specialties -- he has only to let the orchestra and the very refined pianist Maria João Pires do their thing to produce a performance of great finesse.
Few artists have managed the transition from agitator to eminence as gracefully as Boulez, and without forgetting the restless taste for change that fired them in the first place. "At my age, you don't learn much," he remarks, but he has nevertheless refused to ossify. Instead, he keeps nudging the musical world to reinvent itself, to be bolder, more flexible, more inventive -- to become, in fact, more like modern Europe itself.
Top banner photos: Lisbon's Mosteiro dos Jerónimos (Hieronymus Monastery), and Pierre Boulez leading the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.
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Harpist with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. |
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Pierre Boulez first conducted the Berlin in 1961. |
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The DVD of the concert is available from Amazon.com. |
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