By Dennis Polkow

Boulez.  The radical and outspoken enfant terrible who once advocated that concert halls and opera houses should be burnt to the ground as dead monuments to an irrelevant past, but who ended up being known as one of the all-time great conductors and interpreters of that past.

Boulez.  The name of the leading twelve-tone composer of his generation, the man who once advocated that serialism would become “the only musical direction of the future,” and yet who later completely abandoned it as a compositional method.

Boulez.  The frustrated artist who vowed that he would never come back to an artistic position in his native France, and yet who returned to Paris to found and lead the world’s premier experimental music research center at the Centre Pompidou for a decade and a half.

Boulez.  The defiant and arrogant lion in Nietzsche’s “Also sprach Zarathustra” who once attacked all established systems, but who is today as diplomatic and subdued as a pussycat and who has come to epitomize the very musical establishment he once so sharply opposed.

On the surface, at least, it would seem that Pierre Boulez is a man of considerable contradiction.  Rather, Boulez is a man of genuine paradox: a living parable and a walking twentieth-century monument.

Our greatest living figure in music, Boulez is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most significant and innovative composers.  But there is also Boulez the conductor, the champion of new music, of technology to expand music materials, the teacher, guru to rock stars, author and lecturer of international renown; in short, a man who helped reshape the course of music after World War II on a myriad of levels. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dennis Polkow

Pierre Boulez is widely represented on recordings and videos both as a composer and as a conductor. Sony Classical has re-released virtually all of his earliest recordings in a special “Pierre Boulez Edition” released for his eighty-fifth birthday, but many of these recordings have long been supplanted. Deutsche Grammaphon is re-releasing many of its Boulez recordings in multi-disc sets this year and the CSO is even releasing an all-new “Boulez Conducts Stravinsky” disc later this month on its own CSO Resound label. The following very select list is a basic introduction to the remarkable art of Pierre Boulez:

Bartók: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 3. Daniel Barenboim, soloist, Pierre Boulez and the BBC Symphony. Angel/EMI Classics. Many people thought the Bartók Piano concertos were just noise until this legendary 1970 recording forever made these works part of the standard repertory.

Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra, Four Orchestral Pieces, Op. 12. Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Pierre Boulez. Deutsche Grammaphon. This stellar recording swept the Grammy Awards and is the best of several Boulez/CSO recordings of the Hungarian master’s music. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

If you were going to catch only one concert of the month-long Boulez@85 celebration that would tell you the most about the man who is being celebrated, this is the one to catch. We know Boulez is a great conductor, but hearing his own music in Chicago is still somewhat of a rarity compared to how much music we hear Boulez conduct of others. This is the only concert primarily devoted to works composed by Boulez himself.

Opening the program will be French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard performing “Notations,” an early adventurous piano work consisting of several movements which Boulez is in the process of re-imaging for orchestra. Aimard will be joined by his protégé Tamara Stefanovich for “Structures I” for two pianos, the first major piece that Boulez wrote that applied the serial principles of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern to all aspects of its composition: form, rhythm, register, dynamics, et al.     Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The only Boulez work that Boulez himself will conduct with the Chicago Symphony for his month-long eighty-fifth birthday celebration is his short “Livre pour cordes,” his 1969 orchestration of a string quartet (“Livre pour quatuor”) from 1948-1949, which will open this last Boulez CSO program before the celebration transfers to the University of Michigan and to Carnegie Hall in New York next week (Boulez was there last week as well, leading the Vienna Philharmonic with former CSO music director Daniel Barenboim at the piano).

But the real curiosity of this program is Boulez’ first-ever performances of the Bartók Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion, an orchestrated version of the Hungarian composer’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion that Bartók made at the suggestion of his music publisher for orchestras to perform and to have the composer and his wife appear as the soloists during Bartók’s last, lean years in exile in the United States. Boulez had never done the piece before, but being such an admirer of the music of Bartók, the piece made his birthday “wish list.” French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard and his protégé Tamara Stefanovich will be the soloists and the CSO percussion section will also take the spotlight. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

After turning to conducting, initially as an avocation, composer Pierre Boulez was chosen by legendary conductor George Szell in the mid-1960s to become the Cleveland Orchestra’s principal guest conductor so that Szell’s audiences would be able to hear large doses of twentieth-century music that Szell himself felt were beyond his grasp as a conductor to present convincingly.  Boulez’ Cleveland recording of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” from that time revealed the piece with a clarity and power that forever changed the way the public thought about the work.

“That work is extremely important to me,” says Boulez, “but it was rarely performed even in my student days. One performance I heard then with Charles Munch, the sacrificial dance that closes the second part, was as if both the players and conductor were driving on ice; neither were convinced.”

Boulez, for his part, says that he saw the significance of “Sacre,” as he calls it from its original French title, from the moment he saw the score, and that the transparency that became the trademark of his performances was immediately apparent and he admits that his approach to conducting the piece has been the same since he first conducted it nearly half a century ago.   Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

As odd a paradox as it may be, Pierre Boulez, that musical maverick and innovative anarchist forever associated with everything that is young, brash and new, will turn 85 on March 26.  That event is being celebrated worldwide all year long but nowhere as intensely in Chicago, where Boulez remains Conductor Emeritus of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and where he served as Principal Guest Conductor for more than a decade.

Music of Bartók was spotlighted at Boulez’ first-ever appearances with the CSO, back in 1969, the occasion of another historic debut, Daniel Barenboim as piano soloist for two Bartók piano concertos. Bartók once again takes center stage as the centerpiece of the first in a month of special CSO concerts in Chicago and Carnegie Hall called “Boulez@85” where the Hungarian composer’s only opera, “Bluebeard’s Castle,” will be presented in concert form.

Boulez considers the one-act opera one of the most important ever written, but even he has been unable to perform in it a staged version, despite his best efforts. “There is perhaps no staging to compete with the music,” he concedes. “Anything that you do to ‘show’ the content behind each of the seven doors of the castle somehow seems trivial or distracting compared with the music itself.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

There are many moving musical settings of the medieval sequence “Stabat Mater” (“Sorrowful Mother”) that contemplates the suffering of Christ as experienced by the Virgin Mary standing next to the cross during his crucifixion, but none more celebrated nor exquisite than that of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, whose 300th birthday anniversary is January 4, 2010 and is being celebrated all year long. Baroque Band, Chicago’s period-instrument orchestra, gets a head start on the festivities during the very week of the birthday itself with a series of performances of Pergolesi’s most famous work.

Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater” is shrouded in legend since its frail composer wrote it very young and then died soon after at the age of 26. It was commissioned to take the place of another celebrated “Stabet Mater,” that of Scarlatti, and because of its beauty and its composer’s mysterious death soon after the work’s completion, the piece is a staple of major Italian churches during Lent, and is often presented in an elaborate, operatic manner that obscures much of the work’s original intentions. (Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director designate and fellow Neapolitan Riccardo Muti is a particular fan of the work presented in this grandiose style.) The Baroque Band approach will be to strip away these excesses and restore a sense of the original performance style of the piece. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dennis Polkow

Sting, “If On a Winter’s Night” (Deutshe Grammaphon)

Every now and then, a recording artist comes along and completely redefines what a Christmas album is in surprising and delightful ways. Sting’s Christmas album is not only his best new album in a long, long while, but a Christmas record that is good enough to put on any time of the year. The carols chosen tend to be somber, introspective and refreshingly under-produced, usually with Sting’s own voice and simple acoustic accompaniment. Sting claims he is an agnostic, but you would never know from his poignant performances of such traditional holiday fare as “Gabriel’s Message” and the “Cherry Tree Carol.” But the album also features other winter-themed offerings that celebrate the stark beauty of barrenness of the season, such as songs by British baroque composer Henry Purcell about cold and ice, the heartbreaking finale of Schubert’s song cycle of winter and lost love “Winterreise,” Celtic folksongs that include a Halloween offering, and even originals such as Sting’s own setting of Robert Louis’ Stevenson’s “Christmas at Sea” and his own wintry lyrics to the melody of a Bach Cello Suite.

Aretha Franklin, “This Christmas” (DMI Records)

This is Aretha’s first-ever Christmas album, believe it or not (2006’s “Joy to the World” was a record-company compilation of carols and sacred songs from throughout her career), and given the great care that was obviously taken with it, you can tell this is something that has been in the back of her mind for a long, long time. The virtuosity here is stunning and will certainly not be to everyone’s taste, as Aretha tends to take simple familiar songs and vocalize on many of them with “too many notes,” as the emperor told Mozart. But it’s the feeling underlying the notes that makes the grandest impression and the fact that there is so much heart here. There are carols, gospel songs, originals and spoken sections where Aretha offers up family vignettes and hopes. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Soprano Kathleen Battle has had a long connection to Chicago, going back to when she first began singing here as a virtual unknown at Ravinia in the early 1970s.  Some of her earliest recordings were made here with James Levine and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and her last opera performance in the area was a Ravinia concert performance of Donizetti’s “L’elisir d’amore” with Luciano Pavarotti.  Her Lyric Opera appearances have been few and far between, as Battle’s voice has never been a large one, but always a beautiful one.  And while her diva displays of temperament are legendary—even leading to a firing and notorious ban from the Metropolitan Opera where even her old friend Levine could do little to help her—audiences never see that side of her. What will Battle sound like at this stage of her career?  That is anyone’s guess, but she is returning to familiar territory in this ultra-rare area appearance with the Chicago Children’s Choir: holiday fare and spirituals.  Traversing such crowd-pleasing repertoire that poses so little challenge to her technique and surrounded by multicultural singing children during the holiday season, here’s betting that Battle will not only look and sound like a dream, but will be on her very best behavior.  (Dennis Polkow)

December 18, Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph,  (312)334-7777. 7:30pm. $45-$75.

By Dennis Polkow

The “ought” or “aught” decade, as many are now calling it, has seen gargantuan changes to the landscape of classical music in Chicago.  A decade ago, Chicago still had two classical music radio stations, but the air space for WNIB became too valuable a commodity for the family that owned it to resist selling out; WFMT wasted no time in changing its motto from “Chicago’s fine arts station” to “Chicago’s classical station.”

Compact discs were still the media of choice a decade ago, and despite the fact that few downloading options exist that preserve the dynamic range necessary to faithfully reproduce the subtleties of the genre, more and more classical listeners are now embracing non-software listening options.

Chicago, which used to set the industry standard for classical recordings and Grammy Awards, saw a huge reduction in recording activity overall, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra having lost its recording contract under Daniel Barenboim. Pierre Boulez continued to make recordings here with the orchestra now and then for Deutsche Grammaphon, but the CSO became so fed up with the situation that it began releasing its own recordings on its own CSO Resound label, despite the fact that, by then, it had no music director. Read the rest of this entry »