When I started working at the Chicago Symphony, managing the various details of its record label CSO Resound, one of the most appealing aspects of it was that there would eventually be an album with Pierre Boulez. He’d already made many outstanding recordings with the orchestra for Deutsche Grammophon – a detailed survey of Bartok’s works, including the concertos and Bluebeard’s Castle – and various Stravinsky works. But the most recent albums with DG had been taped in the late ’90s, and given his longstanding relationship with the orchestra, I assumed that a Boulez album on CSO Resound was, basically, inevitable.
That album is going to be released in the US this Tuesday (it’s already available on iTunes and in Europe and Asia), and even though I try to keep myself in the background as much as I can about this stuff, nothing we’ve done at the record label has made me as proud as this album. All of our albums have added something new to the catalog, I believe, and demonstrate what the CSO sounds like as it’s constituted today, with the outstanding principal players whose solos you hear now.
Fifty years from now, when someone wants to know what the Chicago Symphony sounded like in a Mahler symphony in the early part of the century, they can hear them in four Mahler symphonies (1, 2, 3, and 6) conducted by Bernard Haitink, and hear that it was an excellent ensemble. Pretty good by any measure – if the label suddenly decided to cease all Mahlerian activity, those four symphonies would still be a milestone.
But with this Boulez album (or “Boulez/Stravinsky” as I’ve been referring to it in innumerable staff emails), it’s personal. There isn’t any living musician who’s had as large an influence on me as Boulez has had, through his writing, lectures, and records (up to and including the $50+ purchase of a first American edition of his out-of-print Notes of an Apprenticeship). I started researching this in detail in grad school around 2001 and visiting Chicago whenever he was conducting, and, for once in life, familiarity didn’t breed contempt, but a desire to dig deeper into music and work out how the details created the sonic picture he was creating.
The Boulez interpretation became a sort of ideal version for me. It’s a cliche now mention his “structural clarity” or that he creates an “X-ray of the score,” but it’s true. Following a score during a Boulez performance, there’s never anything in front of you that’s inaudible. Other conductors, you can read the score and wonder why the cello countermelody is going slack or being ignored, but with Boulez, it’s as if the music becomes a spectrum of precisely etched colors, each immaculately shaded and standing out boldly from those next to it.
I’ve heard him do this with Stravinsky; several Bartok scores; his own works; contemporary scores, most notably Marc-Andre Dalbavie; Mahler symphonies; Debussy; Ravel; and probably several others I’m forgetting at the moment. Even Janacek’s thunderous Sinfonietta with its eleven trumpets, played last season, was turned into a riotous game of counterpoint instead of the brassy thunderstorm it usually is.
So, when the repertoire of this new album was decided to be entirely by Stravinsky, and we had a clear path forward for what the album was going to be, it was satisfying to work on a project with a conductor and musician who’s meant so much to me, personally.
The CSO goes on tour next week to play in Ann Arbor, and my younger brother, whose tastes run more to Kanye West than the WDR Sinfonieorchester, attends the University of Michigan. I told him he has to go to this, since Boulez is conducting. I sold it to him by saying that Boulez was a composer people will be talking about in 200 years the way they talk about Beethoven now. I believe it. Beethoven was hugely controversial in his time, and Boulez still annoys and frustrates some composers stuck in university composition departments. The controversy surrounding Beethoven has settled into an established frame through which we hear his skill routinely, and I think something similar will happen with Boulez as time goes by. He has advocates to conduct and perform his music, and I hope he continues to gain younger ones.
I hope you give the album a listen, and that you enjoy it, because I think the musicians enjoyed the concerts, Boulez enjoyed conducting them and making the album, and it’s been fulfilling and meaningful to me. The recording business may be crashing to the ground around us, but this album will be necessary for years. And so, I should add, will Pierre Boulez.
Shara Worden / My Brightest Diamond