Boulez is back -- Stravinsky, Carter, and oh that Varèse with the CSO

Here is my Friday, February 27 suntimes.com review of the Thursday, February 26, 2009, Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with Pierre Boulez.

Pierre Boulez leads CSO in beautiful music -- and vibrant noise

BY ANDREW PATNER

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Repeated 8 p.m. Saturday and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday March 3

Sometimes you just have to pinch yourself these days at Orchestra Hall.  Yes, we really do have Bernard Haitink and Riccardo Muti heading up the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and, yes, another living legend, Pierre Boulez is continuing his long relationship with the orchestra as well.

Boulez turns 84 next month and the CSO already has announced a month of concerts to mark his 85th birthday in 2010.  But the French composer-conductor has always been much more about the here and now than about festivities or making plans.  And Thursday, he opened the first of two subscription-program weeks (to be followed by two concerts at New York’s Carnegie Hall March 9 and 10) chock-full of variety, unexpected connections, and the rigor and excitement that characterizes the orchestra’s conductor emeritus.

The CSO will mark Pierre Boulez's 85th birthday in 2010 with a month of concerts.
(AP file)

Stravinsky is the draw both weeks, with a rare performance of the full version (including songs) of his 1920 ballet score Pulcinella as the marquee event in March.  And this week’s program opens with two of the revolutionary’s works as well -- the 1942-45 Symphony in Three Movements and the Four Studies for Orchestra, 1914-1928.  Crisply and elegantly presented by Boulez, they remind us of just how deep Stravinsky's early insights into rhythm and structure were and how arresting they remain.

But to these ears the news of the evening were the gauntlets that the Franco-American Edgard Varèse threw down in Greenwich Village on either side of the 1920s.  Stravinsky’s scandals and explosions of expectations were all well and good for the Paris-born Varèse as he arrived in the United States age 32 at the end of 1915.  But they only went so far.  He wanted real explosions.  The modern world was defined by machines and the noises they made, and he wanted to make music out of noise.

Varèse’s successful compositions in this direction include the mammoth 1918-1921 Amériques and the percussion-only Ionisation, 1929-1931.  Astonishingly, these pieces, hits in their time, were not played by the CSO until Boulez programmed them in 1995, when he also recorded them with the orchestra for DG.  Hearing them Thursday offered a clue to the infrequent offering of these immediately attractive spins through many sound worlds: Varèse was so good at what he did, and packed in so much, that he gave those who followed him (including Leonard Bernstein) much of their material and raised the bar so high for the orchestration of modern music that few have matched him since. ,The Boulez-CSO pairing in this repertoire is authoritative.

The program also includes the Chicago première (with the first New York performance to follow next Month at Carnegie) of one of the many pieces to flow recently from the pen of the now 100-year-old phenomenon that is Elliott Carter.  Réflexions, a loopy 10-minute tour for small orchestra, was composed in 2004 for Boulez’s 80th birthday the following spring.  Carter very much builds on Varèse’s noisemaking ideas -- even having the piece open with some chopping on a stone (pierre, en français) -- but seems to add the scenario of a Tom-and-Jerry cartoon to the mix, chasing lines from a giant contrabass clarinet to the piccolo and back across the percussion section.  Good times had by all.