ENSEMBLE INTERCONTEMPORAIN
At a time when the serious-music creative community is fragmented and in danger of losing touch with even well-educated listeners, it’s heartening to see Pierre Boulez still going strong as an apostle and popularizer of 20th-century music. At 68, he may not be the fiercely intellectual and provocative composer he was two decades ago, but as a conductor and lecturer he continues to win over converts young and not so young. The excitement he generates whenever he comes to town is palpable; noticeably youthful crowds flock to Orchestra Hall for his concerts and preconcert chats and to the Art Institute for his stimulating talks on the arts. He was hired by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to bolster its modern wing, and the deal has turned out to be a boon, helping the orchestra reach beyond its subscriber base. Indeed, for many, his three-week guest stint every winter is easily the high point of the season.
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In any case, a capacity crowd showed up at Pick-Staiger, including an unusually large contingent of local composers. Varese’s Integrales was the opening work. Scored for a small ensemble of ten winds and brasses surrounded by four percussion bands, this 1925 composition is typical of Varese’s explorations of shifting orchestral colors and materials. Clusters of sounds rise from various instrumental groupings, waxing and ebbing gradually in intensity; they merge, separate, evaporate, then return in a slightly different guise. There’s something organic and poetic about the way this music unfolds, and when it’s performed with clarity and precision, as it was here, the effect is like watching a field of wildflowers bud, blossom, and wilt in time-lapse.
According to Boulez, Derive 1 (1984) and Derive 2 (1987) are installments in a work in progress, still subject to revision. Both are miniatures. Derive 1 is basically a wind divertimento, orchestrated for flute and clarinet, with accompaniment from violin, cello, and vibraphone; while Derive 2, an 80th-birthday eulogy for Elliott Carter, is more substantial, with a thicker orchestration and more rhythmic variety. Neither is a trailblazing work on the order of Le visage nuptial or Pli selon pli. Yet the EIC’s performances were riveting, and in Derive 2 the players adroitly created a sustained sense of tension through minute changes in density and texture.
Mahler’s monumental Sixth Symphony took up the bottom half of the first week’s program; it was Boulez’s first Mahler with the CSO. Over the years the orchestra, with the help of its superb brass and wind sections and the manipulative direction of Georg Solti, has become celebrated for making the Viennese composer a romantic tragic hero par excellence. His symphonies have been turned into sonic spectacles filled with languid gestures and bittersweet dances with fate. It could have been worse: lesser maestros treat Mahler as a sentimentalist prone to wallow in maudlin remembrances. But Boulez seems to regard Mahler as a thoughtful master of orchestration composing on the cusp of the tonal revolution, a necessary link between Wagner and the radicals of serialism.
