Pierre Boulez is best known as a forbiddingly intellectual composer, not a figure to conjure enthusiastic crowds at a mainstream classical music venue. But he was also Music Director of the New York Philharmonic in the 1970s, and the centerpiece of their “Pierre Boulez at 100” concert was his Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna. The house was indeed packed and gung-ho, at least partly because of the canny addition of choreography by Benjamin Millipied, performed by his company LA Dance Project, seen here in its New York premiere.
Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted. The orchestral forces for this piece, light on strings and heavy on brass and percussion, are divided into eight groups, each with its own percussionist, otherwise ranging in size from one oboist to fourteen brass players. In its original conception, these groups were scattered around the stage. Here, three of the groups were onstage, with the others dispersed to various spots in the balconies, leaving the front of the stage free for the dancers. The stage lights were dimmed to provide atmospheric lighting, also illuminated by waist-high thin white light tubes around the edges of the space.
For much of the piece the groups play independently, with the conductor’s role limited to cueing the beginnings of sections. It builds in density and intensity until the midpoint and then dissipates back to sparser textures. The musical vocabulary is dissonant, as one would expect from Boulez, but instantly appealing; the materials used are long tones and cluster chords preceded by grace notes, and short melodic squiggles, along with clicks and buzzes and the sounds of a vast array of tam-tams and gongs from the percussionists. The musicians delivered all of this immaculately and intensely. At its most dense, the impression was of being surrounded by the sounds of wildlife in a forest at night. Having the large brass group at center stage was obviously logistically necessary, but did occasionally have the unfortunate effect of overpowering the groups elsewhere in the space.
The movement vocabulary mimicked the sonic material and organization to an extent; the concept seemed to be the creation of a ninth group to interact with the orchestra’s eight. The dancers often formed clumps that seemed tantamount to cluster chords, with one soloist across the stage having a similar role to the solo oboe. Moments of stillness equated to silences, not always at the same times. Most interestingly, at one point early on some of the dancers began dancing behind and between the onstage groups of musicians. However, midway through the piece the dancers gathered several of the light tubes from the side of the stage and brought them in to outline a smaller space, from which they then never strayed. This seemed to be meant to correspond to the increased sonic sparseness, but made the silences in the score feel cramped instead of expansive.
The concert also featured Stravinsky’s Octet for Wind Instruments and the Bartók Concerto for Orchestra. It was odd to hear the Stravinsky in a symphonic-sized space; some of the diamond-hard precision was blurred, and the trumpets had a tendency to overbalance the woodwinds. But the circus-like playfulness was fully evident, and any chance to hear Judith LeClair and Roger Nye play bassoon duets is a treat.
There were delicious bassoon duets in the Bartók, as well, along with many other sonic rewards. However, some aspects of Salonen’s take on the piece were more effective than others. While transitions set off by rests were elegant, those without often seemed arbitrary, making the piece seem episodic rather than structured. At times the strings lacked definition in accompaniment roles. But all the climaxes were sufficiently hair-raising, the final movement’s tempo was breathtakingly brisk, and the Shostakovich parody in the third movement was heartwarmingly rude.
