“Bird had a knack for getting from one note to another like nobody else.” That’s how Dizzy Gillespie summarized what made Charlie Parker stand out from everyone around him. Parker had the technique to run circles around people, and the harmonic ingenuity to upend jazz harmony as we knew it, but what made his playing so distinctive was the articulation and what happened in the tiny transitions between notes – regardless of tempo.
That quotation came to mind two weeks ago when Pierre Boulez was conducting Bartok’s one-act opera Bluebeard’s Castle. There’s a quiet, meandering passage near the beginning, when Bluebeard has just entered his castle with his young bride for the basses and cellos, in unison. The way Boulez approached this was to be utterly calm, and let the line seem to drift of its own accord. The sound of those groups of instruments is one I’ve never heard another conductor approximate. It’s precisely controlled, but not rigid, and while every note in the line seems to come as a surprise, the passage, after it’s finished, ends up feeling entirely logical and preordained. How to balance that spontaneity with the forward-thinking logic is some sort of a Boulez hallmark.
You can hear this in a similar passage for the basses alone at the beginning of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, in his recording with the CSO. Once again, it has this sense of stasis while still moving forward, and you don’t know what key you’re in, and yet it sounds entirely natural. When a trumpet chorale enters, there’s something churning down in the lower depths, something motoric, mysteriously but entirely planned.
Boulez and the orchestra seem to navigate these passages the way your hand does as you smooth out a bedsheet. Ahead of your hand is a series of peaks and valleys, with a clear surface beneath them. Boulez makes that surface appear, the way your hand does as it glides across the sheet. And now that I think about it, a hand moving across a sheet happens to be a very Boulezian conducting gesture. (This may be the first time laundry and Bartok have appeared within 100 words of each other.)
So, Boulez also has a knack of getting from one note to the next like nobody else. As with Charlie Parker, I don’t know how he does it, but it sounds intrinsically right, and, in the end, that’s all that matters.