“Boulez 2005” says the sticker on the CD, telling us that this is one of several releases from DG in honour of Pierre Boulez’s 80th birthday. This man has such pulling power that he gets the full gold-plated anniversary treatment every five years. One’s bound to wonder, though, whether this will be the last batch, which is one reason why this CD has a special poignancy. Another reason is that it was with the same repertoire — Bartók piano concertos — that Boulez had one of his first big successes as a conductor back in the 1960s.
The wonder is that Boulez became a conductor at all. In the 1950s he was an outspoken modernist composer, who thought that everything inherited from the past should be trashed. That included orchestras, which he sneeringly described as “sclerotic”. But when given a chance to conduct the music he approved of, ie, music that revolutionised the orchestra from within, he grabbed it. In the 1960s he had to stand in at short notice for the conductor of one of the German radio orchestras, and amazed Paris with an electric performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Other dates followed, and soon everyone knew that here, at last, was the man who could make “difficult” modern music leap off the page. Boulez’s ascent was meteoric, and by the mid-1970s he had risen to the top rank, at one point being simultaneously in charge of the New York Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
What are the qualities that brought him there? Above all, an amazing clarity of ear and mind, which allows him to scrape away the varnish of habit and imprecision, and reveal the detail beneath. In contemporary music and in first-wave modernists such as Bartók and Debussy the results are often miraculous. But of course he has his detractors, who find him clinical, or unable to understand the phraseology of older music. And some people wonder why he keeps returning to the same pieces — these Bartók concertos crop up in his concerts so often you think routine must surely have set in.
But Boulez has never lost the habit of ruthless self-criticism he learned at his Jesuit school, and his performances do change over the years. As this wonderful new CD shows, the mesmerising clarity is still there, but the urge to control every last aspect of the sound has gone, and there’s a welcome flexibility in the rhythm. But the thing that really strikes you is the sheer beauty of the sound. I never thought the dry percussive clicks and dissonant stabs of Bartók ‘s first concerto could be made to sound seductive, but they do here. And the three soloists — Krystian Zimerman, Leif Ove Andsnes and Hélène Grimaud — are all marvellous. Let’s wish him many more anniversaries.
Boulez 2005: Bartók — The Piano Concertos is out now on DG