Back in his days at the helm of the New York Philharmonic, orchestra cynics used to dub Pierre Boulez “the 20th Century Limited.” His seven seasons as principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra have, thank goodness, laid that image to rest. Indeed, no CSO program he has directed here in recent memory better reflects the breadth of his modernist sympathies than the concert he led Thursday night at Symphony Center.
Boulez led another of his investigations of compositional trends in European modernism, this one spanning the late 1920s to the present decade. There was a lot of technically difficult music on display, not all of it equal in quality. But the CSO came through for Boulez like the dedicated band of virtuoso musicians it is.
The conductor clearly wanted the audience to hear the works by Messiaen, Bartok, Berg and Stravinsky in relation to the grand march of 20th Century modernism–even if two of those works, Messiaen’s “Un Sourire” and Bartok’s First and Second Rhapsodies for violin, were little more than musical digressions.
Boulez began with the brief Messiaen piece, a chip from the workbench of his great teacher, in its first CSO performance. Messiaen wrote “A Smile” in 1989, three years before his death, as a bicentenary homage to Mozart. The score alternates soft, luminous clouds of strings and winds with excited bursts of percussive birdsong. There is exquisite beauty in its simplicity; certainly that was the effect in Thursday’s performance.
The Bartok violin rhapsodies are peppery distillations of Hungarian folk music, showpieces designed for the composer-pianist’s own use on the concert stage. They stand apart from the important works of his maturity, which is not to say they don’t make an exhilarating impression when beautifully played.
Gil Shaham, who is recording them as discmates for his Bartok Second Violin Concerto (to be played at next weekend’s concerts), dug into both with a passionate intensity of expression. There was plenty of acerbic bite to his tone, while Boulez proved a sterling accompanist.
The evening’s second CSO first performance was Berg’s “Lyric Suite,” in the composer’s own arrangement for string orchestra. The music is really a cryptic love letter from Berg to his married mistress, Hanns Fuchs-Robettin. But one does not have to understand its complex numerology, or serial methodology, to respond to the piercing beauty of the music. Boulez’s reading was not note-perfect, yet it was good enough to illustrate what might be called Boulez’s Law: Even thorny modern music will stimulate, rather than repel, an audience as long as it is played with absolute conviction.
Much the same dictum applied to Boulez’s powerful, rhythmically precise, finely balanced account of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, which was entering his local repertoire for the first time. The curmudgeonly Stravinsky would have admired the bracing clarity Boulez brought to such telling details as the sputtering bassoon and clarinets at the end of the first movement. The performance ended the concert on an affirmative high.
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The program will be repeated at 1:30 p.m. Friday, 8 p.m. Saturday and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. Phone 312-294-3000.
