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Los Angeles Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Could Esa-Pekka Salonen return to the L.A. Phil? Recent appearances raise hope
Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic celebrated the centenary of Pierre Boulez's birth with an extravagance of sonic invention and dance. Eight clusters of Los Angeles Philharmonic players, ranging from a single oboe to groupings of winds and brass and strings seated onstage and around Walt Disney Concert Hall, set a ceremonial tone. Percussion was exotic. Six members of L.A. Dance Project performed as if ejected by each of the 14 sections of Boulez's resonant score. Over its 23-year history, Disney Hall has seemingly seen it all thanks to the L.A. Phil's eagerness to indulge exorbitant (and costly) fancies. It has done it again in an extraordinary tribute concert unlike any other. The question is: Now what? The extraordinary performance of Boulez's 'Rituel' on Sunday concluded Salonen's seasonal two-week appearances as L.A. Phil conductor laureate. It also was his first time back with his old orchestra after announcing last year that he would not renew his contract as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, acknowledging that he did not share its board's vision for the future. Speculation has grown over a Salonen return to the L.A. Phil. No one has yet been named to succeed Gustavo Dudamel, who leaves at the end of next season to take over the New York Philharmonic. When Kim Noltemy became president and CEO last summer, the hiring relieved worry that the L.A. Phil board might take it upon itself to appoint a music director. It is now likely that the L.A. Phil may be without a music director for a couple of years. And from the enthusiastic response of audiences and reportedly of the musicians, nothing would make many happier than having Salonen back to guide the orchestra through a transition period. We'll have to wait and see whether Salonen, who turns 67 next month, would accept such an offer. He has made it clear that — after a long career as music director in Stockholm, London, L.A. and San Francisco — he welcomes a reprieve from institutional demands. He is sought after as composer and conductor and can now do exactly what he wants. Even so, his 17 history-making years as music director of the L.A. Phil and his thus far 16 years as conductor laureate have allowed him to have realized his ambitions on a scale nowhere else imaginable. In L.A. he has a venue like no other in Disney Hall, which he opened. The L.A. Phil is an orchestra more flexible than any other, and in L.A. Salonen has benefited from daring administrations able to afford Salonen's effort to create an orchestra for a new era — a promise the San Francisco Symphony couldn't, or wouldn't, deliver. All of this was evident in Salonen's Boulez tribute with the L.A. Phil. Benjamin Millepied's choreography for 'Rituel,' featuring his L.A. Dance Project, had its premiere with Salonen conducting Orchestre de Paris at the Philharmonie in Paris on Boulez's 100th birthday in March. That program began with a small octet by Stravinsky and Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. Even though that concert was in the Philharmonie's Grande salle Pierre Boulez and was arguably the city's most important tribute to a composer who had been a musical monarch in Paris, only that one half-hour Boulez piece was on the program. At Disney, the L.A. Phil's huge program began with French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard playing two of Boulez's solo 'Notations' followed by the composer's massively expanded versions requiring a huge orchestra with large brass and wind sections, three harps and considerable percussion. Fifteen extra players were required for less than 10 minutes of music. When I asked Noltemy about that expense, she asked with a laugh, when has the L.A. Phil ever let budget get in the way of artistic ambition? Along with 'Notations,' Salonen conducted Bartok's Piano Concerto No. 3, featuring Aimard, and Debussy's 'La Mer,' works that he recorded with the L.A. Phil in the 1990s. Those recordings hold up for their crystalline sound and youthful spunk. Those qualities remain, but with a new richness and sense of overpowering fullness. Indeed, conductor, orchestra, repertoire and hall all were simply made for one another. Boulez's music is complexly detailed and has had a long history of putting off audiences. But in the right context, it can be heard as though a brilliant flowering of Debussy's colors and flavors. Aimard played the tiny piano fourth and seventh 'Notations' with rapt attention on tiny details, while Salonen saw to it that the orchestral explosions contained multitudes of colors within controlled chaos. Aimard added a couple more 'Notations' as an encore to his soulful, robust way with Bartok's concerto, especially in the beautiful middle movement. 'Rituel' was a memorial to the Italian composer and conductor Bruno Maderna, who died in 1973. They seemed very different personalities, the analytical Boulez and the sensual Maderna, but 'Rituel' profoundly reveals that they had much in common. Boulez's score, full of Asian and Indonesian percussion, is, in its own way, as sonically engulfing as anything by Maderna. It also makes an for an easy connection with the revolutionary influence of Japanese music on Debussy's 'La Mer,' which then went on to influence Boulez, who made conducting it a specialty. Each of the different groups in 'Rituel' has its own highly organized music. They come together, cued by the conductor, with a sense of nature's unpredictability. So was the case, as well, with Millepied's superb dancers, who went their own ways but collided and coagulated, ferociously and sexually. There has been little dance made to Boulez. Millepied shows that however formidable the rhythms, there could be more. For Salonen's previous week with the L.A. Phil, he began with Debussy's 'Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun' floating through the hall. Bryce Dessner's recent Violin Concerto was dominated by soloist Pekka Kuusisto's vivid bowing, creating astonishing acoustical effects with harmonics. Salonen ended with Beethoven's 'Eroica,' which he made sound like it could have been written after Dessner's concerto, not more than two centuries before. What's next for Salonen? His final San Francisco Symphony concerts are next month, assuming the orchestra doesn't go on strike. He has a busy summer that begins by touring the New York Philharmonic to Korea and China. There are appearances with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood, a collaboration with director Peter Sellars in Salzburg, the world premieres of his Horn Concerto in Lucerne, a European tour with the Orchestre de Paris. Early fall, Salonen reprises 'Rituel' with the New York Philharmonic, which is a co-commisioner of the choreography along with L.A. and Paris. On it goes pretty much nonstop throughout the rest of the year. He's back in L.A. in January with more ambitious programming. None of this makes a Salonen return to L.A. sound necessary. But there remain opportunities here that can only be dreams elsewhere.
The Guardian
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Proms 2025 season offers plenty both to cherish and challenge
Even if it doesn't really seem like one, this year's Proms marks the beginning of a new era for what styles itself as the world's biggest classical music festival. Though Sam Jackson took over as controller of BBC Radio 3 and director of the Proms two years ago, the 2023 and 2024 programmes were essentially planned under the aegis of his predecessor as Proms supremo David Pickard. So the coming season is the first for which Jackson has been responsible, though he is keen to emphasise that organising a festival on the scale of the Proms is a team effort, and that though his name is the one that appears on the introduction to the printed guide, he is just one among several who have put the season together – a season of 72 concerts in the Royal Albert Hall, together with weekend residencies and concerts in Belfast, Bradford, Bristol, Gateshead and Sunderland. Certainly the alterations that have been made to the eight weeks of concerts so far seem more matters of subtle degree than radical shifts in emphasis. There have been fears that the changes that have already been inflicted on Radio 3 during Jackson's tenure might be mirrored in his first Proms. These include the tendency to play single movements rather than complete works, while avoiding any details such as opus and catalogue numbers that might be construed as off-puttingly musicological, as well as the launch of Radio 3 Unwind, devoted to music to 'restore calm'. Such worries are quickly allayed though by a glance at the programmes, which contain as much serious, challenging music, both old and new, as ever. And whether deliberate or not, the choice of repertoire and the artists performing it this year suggest that attempts to ensure that every politically correct box has been ticked seem far less strenuous and contrived than they sometimes have in previous years. Though there is no over-arching theme to the season, significant musical anniversaries are appropriately marked, with the exception perhaps of the 500th anniversary of Palestrina's birth. There's Arvo Pärt's 90th birthday, the 150th anniversaries of the births of Ravel and Samuel Coleridge Taylor, and the 50ths of the deaths of Bernard Herrmann and Shostakovich, while this year's two great centenarians, Pierre Boulez and Luciano Berio, are celebrated in a late-night visit by Ensemble intercontemporain, as well as in orchestral concerts. Though performances of Berio's famous Sinfonia, his Schubert-based Rendering, and the music-theatre piece Recital I (For Cathy) are welcome inclusions, it's a shame that a concert performance of one of his operas that has yet to be heard in Britain could not have been organised, and that one of Boulez's rarely heard early choral works could not be revived, especially in the wake of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's outstanding performance of Pli Selon Pli in the Barbican's Boulez day last month. As usual too the new works, the world or British premieres, vary from the genuinely intriguing to the seemingly dutiful. Tom Coult's Monologues for the Curious, inspired by the ghost stories of MR James and composed for tenor Allan Clayton, and Mark Simpson's ZEBRA, a guitar concerto for Sean Shibe, after the sci-fi of Philip K Dick, belong in the first category, as does Anna Thorvaldsdottir's cello concerto, Before We Fall, and Gabriella Smith's organ concerto, Breathing Forests. And while there aren't any standout special events – performances of works that only an organisation such as the BBC would have the financial and musical muscle to put on – it will good to hear Birtwistle's Earth Dances and Steve Reich's The Desert Music played live again, while British music aficionados won't want to miss three choral rarities, Vaughan Williams's Sancta Civitas, Arthur Bliss's Morning Heroes and Delius's Mass of Life. Transatlantic orchestras, however, are still conspicuous by their absence. The regular stream of visiting ensembles in previous years that represented the cream of the orchestral world in the final weeks of the season now seems very much a thing of the past. There are two concerts each from the Royal Concertgebouw under Klaus Mäkelä and the Vienna Philharmonic with Franz Welser-Möst, who is rarely seen in London these days, as well as a one-off appearance from the Leipzig Gewandhaus with Andris Nelsons. Other visitors include the Danish National Symphony, the Melbourne Symphony and the Budapest Festival orchestras, but as usual the majority of the concerts are sourced from the BBC's 'house' orchestras, and the independent home-based ones, some with their regular conductors and some with guests. As ever, tickets to stand, either in the arena or in the gallery under the dome of the RAH and which are only made available on the day of each concert remain a bargain, priced at £8 throughout the season. But elsewhere in the hall prices vary widely from evening to evening, though for most concerts the most expensive seats are around £60. Sometimes they're considerably more than that, though the logic behind some of the pricing is hard to follow. There's a top price of £110 for the second of the Vienna Philharmonic's concerts, for instance, a programme of Mozart and Tchaikovsky, while the previous evening, with the same orchestra and conductor performing Berg and Bruckner, the most you will pay is £86. No doubt the BBC and the Albert Hall have their reasons for these and other disparities, and meanwhile throughout the two months of concerts, you can always a get to hear lot of good music for a lot less. The Proms will run from 18 July to 13 September. General booking opens at 9am on 17 May.
New York Times
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Pierre Boulez Was a Titan of 20th-Century Music. What About Now?
Few musicians could be the focus of an architectural tour. Pierre Boulez is one of them. In the Fourth Arrondissement of Paris, next to the Centre Pompidou, you'll find IRCAM, the sound research center that Boulez founded in the 1970s. Not far away, on Place de la Bastille, is an opera house where he suffered one of the few failures of his long career. And on the outskirts of the city, at Parc de la Villette, his Cité de la Musique complex produces concerts, exhibitions and classes, a factory of culture where industrial slaughterhouses once sprawled. The most recent addition to the Cité de la Musique is the Philharmonie de Paris, a concert hall whose main auditorium is named after Boulez. It was completed in 2015, a year before his death, at 90, but he never got to see it. Still, it stands today as a kind of monument to this titan of the past century's music, a composer, conductor, theorist and a canny political force. Michael Haefliger, a friend and colleague from the Lucerne Festival, called Boulez 'the Einstein of music.' The conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen, an inheritor of Boulez's ethos, described him as 'one of the most influential people in music, period.' What exactly, though, is Boulez's influence? A hundred years after his birth, and nearly a decade since his death, his legacy isn't necessarily as a composer. Celebrating his centennial at the Philharmonie in March, two performances of his 'Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna' were notable mostly for their rarity. His music, like that of his peers from the post-World War II generation of high modernists, like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono, is brilliant but out of fashion, and difficult to program. To get a sense of Boulez's true legacy, look at how 'Rituel' was presented. With an accompanying dance by Benjamin Millepied, the evening embraced experimentation, a hallmark of Boulez, a musician who tried to dissolve the boundaries between performers and audience members in the 1970s. That is just one way in which, with lasting influence, Boulez changed how we think about music itself: how it is created, performed and heard, as well as where these things happen, from subterranean laboratories to IRCAM to the modular auditorium, a dream of his that has become the standard for new concert halls today. 'His vision,' said Frank Madlener, the director of IRCAM, 'is all over.' BOULEZ WAS A late bloomer. Born in Montbrison, France, a small town to the west of Lyon, he was passionate about music but bound for a career in engineering. Against his father's wishes, he spent his teens working to get into a conservatory. Not long before his 19th birthday, he was admitted to the famous Conservatoire de Paris. There, his teachers included Olivier Messiaen (who, for comparison, entered the same conservatory at 11). Boulez quickly differentiated himself from Messiaen's convention-defying but tonally colorful vein of modernism; within a year, he was more under the spell of Schoenberg's dodecaphonic system of writing, which influenced his first proper work, the piano solo 'Douze Notations.' Boulez, who seemed to hold only severe opinions, would later disavow and then again accept 'Douze Notations.' In one interview, he argued that early works mean little in the scope of a composer's career, saying, 'It's not because you listen to 'Rienzi' that you are really going to comprehend 'Tannhäuser.'' He became a conductor out of practicality. After learning to play the ondes Martenot, a pioneering electronic instrument, from its creator, he made a modest living with gigs at places like the Folies Bergère. In 1946, he picked up a music job in a production of 'Hamlet' by the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault, where he spent the next nine years as the music director of a small ensemble. It was through that troupe's founders that he started a concert series called the Domaine Musical, a place for the music he was hearing and creating with Stockhausen and others in his concurrent work at the Darmstadt summer course in Germany. But Boulez was also interested in conducting earlier 20th-century music, as well as some established classics, particularly operas, which he took up to nearly instant acclaim. For Boulez's centennial year, Deutsche Grammophon has released two boxed sets: a reissue of his complete works, and a nearly 90-disc collection of his albums for the label and Decca. Throughout the recordings, his defining trait as a conductor is clarity. He had a remarkable ability to render scores by Webern and Schoenberg legible, and few accounts of Stravinsky's 'The Rite of Spring' can match his balance of control and ferocity. When he found a kindred spirit in a soloist, like the soprano Teresa Stratas in Berg's 'Lulu,' the results were nothing less than extraordinary. In 1971, Boulez succeeded Leonard Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic, where he programmed as much Stravinsky as Beethoven. His Rug Concerts, in which the seats of Avery Fisher Hall were removed and the orchestra situated in the center of the auditorium, became cult favorites. The series was a way to appeal to new audiences through a Woodstock-esque vibe of relaxation, with the spirit of a special event, something orchestras still strive for today. Earlier this year, the Philharmonic revived a Rug Concert, unfortunately in a traditional setup. Even so, it was just as appealing for its musical choices as it would have been for Boulez's arrangement. A Brandenburg concerto followed by Schubert's Second Symphony, Webern's Symphony, selections from Boulez's 'Pli Selon Pli' and Stravinsky's suite from 'L'Histoire du Soldat': There hasn't been a more interesting or satisfying program at the Philharmonic this season. During Boulez's years at the Philharmonic, he was lured back to France by the president, Georges Pompidou, who asked him to develop the research institute that would become IRCAM. It was the start of Boulez's era as a builder, navigating politics through changing administrations and tides of public opinion, while also transcending it. While IRCAM was under construction, he founded Ensemble Intercontemporain, a group devoted to new music. The next decade, he was brought in as a leader in building the Opéra Bastille, which became a wellspring of disaster. Its original plans included what Boulez called a 'salle modulable,' a hall that could be reconfigured for different purposes, but as the budget and construction timeline ballooned, the space was scrapped. That idea was finally realized when Cité de la Musique opened in the mid-1990s; now, it is more or less the default. During these decades of construction, Boulez held a chair at the Collège de France, where he delivered a series of lectures that, collected in one volume, look and often read like a lead brick. They are just a portion of his immense output as a writer, the largest since Berlioz's in the 19th century. He was often provocative and absolute, only to change his mind and contradict himself with equal conviction. Laurent Bayle, who succeeded Boulez at IRCAM and Cité de la Musique, and recently published the book 'Pierre Boulez, Aujourd'hui' ('Pierre Boulez Today'), said, 'There is no ideologue in music like him.' Because Boulez was so powerful, his severity could be poison for any artist who didn't adhere to his worldview. He disdained vast swaths of repertoire, to the point where he could seem stubbornly incurious, as in his lack of interest in works by Philip Glass and John Adams. Salonen recalled watching Boulez virtually end the career of a composer after hearing his work, but he also said he was attracted, like many of his modernist peers, to the 'concept of right and wrong' that Boulez offered. 'It was an ethics of contemporary music,' Salonen said. 'Young people want to know the right thing to do, and Boulez was like a moral beacon. He could make you feel like you belonged, like you were one of the good guys.' Perhaps surprisingly, Boulez is often remembered as a warm, wickedly funny presence. Despite his stature, he wasn't a haughty maestro. The French critic Christian Merlin, in his excellent but untranslated biography 'Pierre Boulez,' describes tours in which he rode in coach with musicians rather than business class, and stayed in the same hotels. And there was a generosity in his last act, as the founder and leader of the academy at the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, at Haefliger's invitation. Not long after taking over the festival, Haefliger called Boulez, who 'knew exactly what he wanted to do,' he recalled. 'And I appreciate that this was it, rather than creating polished symphonies or looking for immediate success.' BOULEZ WROTE RELATIVELY LITTLE music. In Deutsche Grammophon's set, his catalog takes up only 11 discs. Salonen said that 'we're too close still' to know what among his works will remain in the repertoire, but some are candidates for classics. And the masterpieces came early. Merlin wrote that with the monumentality of the Second Piano Sonata, 'the young Boulez didn't hesitate to assume the legacy of Beethoven: At 22 years old, he wrote his 'Hammerklavier.'' 'Le Marteau Sans Maître' (1955), a chamber setting of René Char poems for alto and six instrumentalists, appropriately remains an event whenever performed, proof that avant-garde music of its era can be as beautiful as it is intellectual. From there, the list goes on: 'Pli Selon Pli,' 'Répons,' the 'Rituel' recently presented in Paris. Why is Boulez's music so rarely performed? His generation's modernism, sometimes combative in its sound, has at best a cult audience today. Among his peers, though, Boulez stands a comparatively better chance of being programmed. His works may be challenging and idiosyncratic, but they are mostly written for traditional instruments. As Madlener said, 'He was pragmatic, not utopian like Stockhausen.' But Salonen said that Boulez's music asks too much of traditional orchestras: They are written for oddly sized ensembles, which can trigger union complications that likely won't be made up for in ticket sales. 'It's not the kiss of death,' he said of programming a Boulez work, 'but it doesn't help.' Yet the Rug Concert revival in New York earlier this year played to a full house, and the two 'Rituel' performances in Paris sold out. That may have less to do with the music, though, than with making them 'events.' Boulez, a believer in music as event, probably would have approved. An orchestral concert made into a singular moment was among the many signs of Boulez's legacy in Paris during the week of his centennial, even when his music wasn't being performed. IRCAM and Ensemble Intercontemporain continue to thrive, with the spirit of their founder intact even if, as Madlener said, 'there is no aesthetic connection to him at all' in the new works they produce. (Boulez had no interest in composers emulating his sound.) Millepied, too, created a distinct aesthetic inspired by but not analogous to the sound of 'Rituel,' an antiphonal work in which eight small groups of musicians are spread throughout the auditorium. (The dance, along with the rest of the Philharmonie program, comes to the New York Philharmonic this fall.) 'I had this puzzle idea, where you see bits of material alone, and when they come together, your brain receives that it has seen all these pieces already,' Millepied said. 'But while I started with a mathematical, nerd approach in how I wanted to make it, I ended up somewhere emotional.' Boulez's score was a starting point. But it evolved into something else, given to the public in an auditorium named after him, on the campus of a music center that he created, in the city where the monuments to his artistry live and breathe rather than gather dust. Not bad, as legacies go.
The Guardian
05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The week in classical: BBCSO Total Immersion: Pierre Boulez; RLPO/ Hindoyan: Mahler Symphony No 3; Joyce DiDonato and Maxim Emelyanychev
At a talk about Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) at the Barbican last Sunday, one of the speakers dared suggest that the BBC is no longer the cultural beacon it was in the French composer-conductor's lifetime. The exhalation of oufs and pffs from the audience – reminiscent of one of those short, avant-garde pieces consisting only of outbursts of breath that Boulez himself might have written – was indicative: part you're stating the obvious, part how can you say the unsayable in a discussion being broadcast on BBC Radio 3. After some hasty throat clearing, the matter was clarified: other platforms now exist, from YouTube to Spotify to TikTok to all the rest. We are our own curators. The very next day, tacitly acknowledging its changed status, the BBC admitted it faced an unprecedented financial challenge, with an annual income drop of £1bn compared with 15 years ago. Its chair, Samir Shah, said (among other things) that the BBC still had a vital role as 'the place where people come together for unforgettable shared moments'. Later this month, the new season of Proms, the biggest coming together for classical music, will be announced. The BBC orchestras and BBC Singers, endangered for as long as anyone can remember, will play a central part. However sceptical we may be about aspects of Radio 3, or its new sibling, Classical Unwind – designed to awaken the senses and simultaneously relax you into sleep – their very presence is still remarkable. This thought pressed constantly, and urgently, at Total Immersion: Pierre Boulez, an all-day BBC Symphony Orchestra tribute to the brilliant and paradoxical maverick who, in his time as the ensemble's chief conductor (1971-74), shook up concert life – including the Proms, with his Roundhouse series. Always radical, he celebrated intellectual rigour and scorned anything out of line with his thinking: famously, at one time, opera houses he wanted to burn down and Tchaikovsky, whose music he claimed to hate. As a conductor, his quest was for transparency and precision, and an avoidance of any emotion that did not grow directly from the music. His own works, glittering and complex yet more sensuous than he himself might have realised, came only after long struggles and endless revisions. The BBC SO day, which included the pianist Tamara Stefanovich's crystalline accounts of 12 Notations (1945) and Incises (1994, revised 2001), culminated in Pli selon pli, a 70-minute epic that, with Le Marteau sans maître, is Boulez's acknowledged masterpiece. Here it was conducted by Martyn Brabbins and performed with consummate skill by all. The title translates as Fold Upon Fold, from a poem by Boulez's favourite poet, Mallarmé, in which mist recedes to reveal the city of Bruges. Boulez revised it six times between 1957 and 2003. It requires us to rethink what an orchestra is, making it expensive to perform: instead of the usual forces, each instrument is, in effect, hand-picked. A soprano soloist – here the pure-toned Anna Dennis – sings brief texts, scaling an ensemble that jangles and shimmers with multiple harps, guitar, mandolin, celesta, tubular bells and 30 types of percussion. 'That was fantastic, but when will it ever happen again?' someone asked me, noticing my programme as I got off the tube. I have no idea. It felt like stepping back in history, to a period of stern but invigorating musical cubism that liberated younger generations, among them the British composers Harrison Birtwistle and George Benjamin. Who will now take the Boulez legacy forward is an unanswered question. One of his passions was Mahler, especially the later symphonies. Through concerts and recordings he was a pioneer in sparking the modern reappraisal. Boulez's particular interest was in Mahler's expansion of symphonic form – a bit of an understatement as a phrase, since none of the nine (complete) is short, and the Third is reckoned the longest in standard repertory, lasting up to 110 minutes. Given that it self-confessedly embraces all the world, it could be deemed a bit brief. No watch-checking was required in the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra's heartfelt performance in the Philharmonic Hall, under the baton of their charismatic chief conductor, Domingo Hindoyan. The occasion, with the sopranos and altos of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir and the Liverpool Philharmonic Youth Choir, had heightened emotion, since it marked the retirement, after 16 years as chief executive, of one of the most admired orchestral administrators around, Michael Eakin. Tempos tended towards the broad, but atmosphere and detail shone out, ebbing and flowing through the six movements, from rustic dance to Nietzschean nocturne. The soloist Jennifer Johnston, herself a Liverpudlian, is the mezzo-soprano of choice for the glowing intensity of O Mensch. The big trombone solo, menacing, low and insistent in the huge opening movement, was impeccably played. So too was the offstage post horn, calling as if from a distant Austro-Bohemian peak. From massed orchestra and chorus to one singer and one pianist is less of leap than might appear: Schubert, admired (mostly) by his fellow Austrian Mahler, also explored long form, in his late piano sonatas, and especially in the song cycle Winterreise. Joyce DiDonato recorded it with the conductor-pianist Yannick Nézet-Séguin in 2021. At Wigmore Hall she sang it – twice in one evening – with another regular collaborator, conductor and keyboard virtuoso Maxim Emelyanychev, here playing a fortepiano. This earlier instrument transfigured the piano part, now more clipped, alert, imperative. DiDonato has, lightly and unobtrusively, with use of a small desk and book, suggested a historical setting for these 24 songs of loss and love, written for male voice. The shifts in feeling, as well as the deepening and whitening of vocal colour, could have a column to themselves. As only she could – whoever utters anything after Winterreise? – the 'Yankee Diva' spoke a few words and gave us an encore: Richard Strauss's Morgen! Nothing to add to that. Star ratings (out of five) Pierre Boulez ★★★★ Mahler Symphony No 3 ★★★★★ Joyce DiDonato and Maxim Emelyanychev ★★★★
Los Angeles Times
01-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Why the L.A. Phil's Handel festival was downright revelatory
In 1707 George Frideric Handel, a 22-year-old radical composer working in Rome, startled the Vatican and the public with 'Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno' (The Triumph of Time and Disillusion). An opera disguised as an oratorio to get around the church's ban on profane opera, the impolitic work about past and present is formed as the conflict between extravagance and sanctity. Humanizing our obsession with beauty and obligation for council, Handel's early masterpiece comes across as timely as it is titillating. Exactly 240 years later, another radical 22-year-old, Pierre Boulez, began his Second Piano Sonata. This wild and impolitic work startled civilized Parisian salons with what sounded like sheer ugliness. Yet it took a sonata this complex and aggressive to seed the European post-World War II avant-garde and provide a basis for music that headed in new directions. Boulez, who died nine years ago, would have been 100 last Wednesday. Among the universal celebrations of his work this season, a young and appropriately wild pianist with a taste for death metal, Thomas Mellan, impressively captured the aggression of Boulez's Second Sonata on the composer's birthday as part of the Piano Spheres series at the Colburn School. The next night, across the street at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic presented 'Il Trionfo' to conclude a groundbreaking weeklong Handel Project, the first installment of French conductor and harpsichordist Emmanuelle Haïm's new three-year role as the orchestra's artist collaborator. What are the odds of these rare works showing up back to back? Very great in most places but less surprising here. Boulez had close ties with Piano Spheres founder Leonard Stein (who gave the first L.A. performance of the Second Sonata in 1963) and with the L.A. Phil (which will be celebrating Boulez next month). In her own right, Haïm has broken Baroque barriers. She made an arresting L.A. Phil debut in 2011, bringing an uninhibited lustiness to Handel, and with each successive appearance she has caused the Baroque to seem increasingly modern, almost as unpredictable and changeable as Boulez. Her appointment of artist collaborator follows that of opera director Yuval Sharon, who was better known as an artistic disruptor, a designation equally well suited to Haïm. Nine years ago, Haïm was the conductor in a highly provocative staging of 'Il Trionfo' at the summer Aix-en-Provence festival that included a filmed clip of the French theorist Jacques Derrida, who was sometimes accused of doing to literary studies what Boulez had done to music, and vice versa. Haïm furthermore recorded 'Il Trionfo' back in 2004 at IRCAM, the computer music institute Boulez created in Paris. Haïm framed 'Il Trionfo' at Disney Hall with singular brilliance. Her Handel Project included three programs. For regular L.A. Phil subscription concerts the weekend of March 21-23, she conducted Bach's Magnificat and Handel's 'Dixit Dominus.' This was followed by two programs with Haïm's own ravishing period instrument ensemble, Le Concert d'Astrée. These consisted of a Rameau/Handel program, studies in luxuriant sonorities. 'Il Trionfo' came last. The L.A. Phil, sparing little expense, also flew over Haïm's 25-member d'Astrée choir from Paris along with eight extraordinary vocal soloists. Handel's 'Dixit Dominus,' which was composed the same year as 'Il Trionfo' and began Haïm's L.A. Phil program, set the scene. It too is boldly operatic, especially for a sacred work. It avoids scandal, though, by being a seductive joy to hear and by not undertaking the riskier human desires of 'Il Trionfo.' At Disney Hall it offered unalloyed joy. Haïm's virtuosic d'Astrée choir dazzled. The L.A. Phil gave the best approximation of playing period instruments I've encountered. With Bach's Magnificat and an encore of 'Happy, Happy Shall We Be' from Handel's 'Semele,' 'Dixit Dominus' made sure that happiness prevailed. Wonderful smiles all around, on stage and off. In the next concert March 25, Handel's 'Ode for St. Cecilia's Day,' a setting of poetry by John Dryden, took even fewer risks, at least for anyone with a love for music. The 'Ode' celebrates in exalted song and irresistibly vivid instrumental invention, the wonder of music in all its processes and measures. Handel delights in the blaring trumpet, the warbling flute, the miracle of harmony, the capacity of music to tame the savage beast and offer revelations of the beyond. Haïm seemed to have one instruction for her ensemble chorus and her soloists, soprano Elsa Benoit and tenor Eric Ferring: Find, in every utterance, ever more happiness. This emotionally upbeat preparation made 'Il Trionfo' appear all the more revolutionary with its allowances for disrupting musical formulas as well as psychological ones. Coping with truth and disillusion caused Handel to return again and again to the work over half a century, rewriting it twice (the last time at the end of his life) as the mature and stately 'The Triumph of Time and Truth.' Even so, it is the freshness of allegorical audacity as a young genius looks ahead that has the most relevance. The characters are Beauty, Pleasure, Time and Disillusion. Beauty is young and vain. Pleasure assures her that she can stay that way, so she might as well live it up as long as she can. Time says not so fast. Disillusion warns her that the road to salvation is to face the facts. It takes her 2 ½ stubborn hours to finally follow Disillusion. But Pleasure cannot be defeated. She's ready for the next victim. She lives for the moment and will not let it go. Time and Disillusion remain abstractions up to the point when we dare no longer fool ourselves. Haïm's inspired singers — Benoit (Beauty), Julia Lezhneva (Pleasure), Iestyn Davies (Disillusion) and Petr Nekoranec (Time) — each gave a convincing arguments. Pleasure is often presented as a sleazy male operator. Lezhneva's enthralling Pleasure acted as a kind of ghost, a haunted wanderer seeking her own validation rather than victims. Handel wrote for Pleasure one of his most famous and moving arias, 'Lascia la spina.' Leave the thorn, Pleasure utters in lament, take the rose. Handel reused it later in his opera 'Renaldo.' Haïm moved the Thursday performance along with an intensity that didn't allow any room for applauding arias. The stunning impact of Lezhneva's 'Lascia' was the sound of a large audience withholding gasps of awe. There is little equal in music to 22-year-old disruptors on the level of Handel and Boulez. We are in an age of gleeful disruption, particularly as we witness Silicon Valley strategies and the tearing down of the federal government. Handel and Boulez revealed a different strategy. Both may have been aggressive in their demands that the world be ready for a new direction. But they tore down worn-out classical structures in which they were deeply schooled, knowing already what worked and what needed replacement. They took the next step anticipating where the new freedom would take them. Both spent the next half century developing ideas they initiated in these two early works, making them matter, as they still do.
