http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/arts/music/pierre-boulez-the-complete-columbia-album-collection.html 2014-12-07 06:18:06 ‘Pierre Boulez: The Complete Columbia Album Collection’ A vast new CD set of music conducted by Pierre Boulez is rare for its scrupulous attention to both classical and contemporary, and highlights just how radical his New York Philharmonic tenure was. === “Da da da DAH!” Music’s most famous opening is also one of its least predictable. The whole trajectory of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony rides on its opening rest — a sharp intake of breath — and its Perhaps, then, Now it has finally emerged in pristine sound, as part of a vital, solidly presented boxed set produced by Sony Classical, “ Why now? In an interview by email, Bogdan Roscic, the president of Sony Music Masterworks, said that with Mr. Boulez’s 90th birthday approaching next March, “we wanted to present as complete a picture as we could of his work as a conductor.” (The set omits the recordings he has made for Deutsche Grammophon.) Lumbered with long back catalogs and shrinking demand, record companies have let loose a deluge of boxed sets, often covering the complete careers of conductors, pianists, singers and everything in between. These are niche products, but often successful ones. Mr. Roscic said that the target audience for such sets is the collector’s market, “people who appreciate an authoritative career overview,” listeners who already have many but not all of the recordings in a new box — or none at all. Though an example of the trend, this set is rare for its coherent approach to making music: clear, expository and revelatory, treating older and contemporary music with equal weight. For once and for all, it should counter Mr. Boulez’s reputation for dryly intellectual, emotionless conducting, the work of a composer-conductor trying objectively to reveal structure at the expense of everything else. Much has been reissued before. Mr. Boulez’s devastating “Wozzeck” from the Opéra National de Paris and his incendiary Covent Garden “Pelléas et Mélisande,” for instance, have long anchored my understanding of those pieces. There are other core recordings here, too, like Debussy with the New Philharmonia and an important traversal of Schoenberg with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Among multiple recordings of Berg’s “Altenberg Lieder” and “Seven Early Songs” in the set, versions that Mr. Boulez recorded with Halina Lukomska and Heather Harper receive their first digital releases and surprise with his lush colorations. And there are surprises, too, like a raucous reading of Roussel’s Third Symphony, a vigorous performance of Handel’s “Water Music,” a lurid account of the Dukas ballet “La Péri” and Wagnerian rarities like the early choral piece “Das Liebesmahl der Apostel.” Yet amid all that, the Beethoven is the real novelty. So why the fuss? Why, in a set so filled with 20th-century riches, focus on an omnipresent work and a performance that Mr. Boulez told Jean Vermeil, The problem is speed. Few conductors in the decades before period performance practice took seriously Beethoven’s metronome marking of 108 bars per minute, but Mr. Boulez openly mocks it, in a deliberate provocation. Scarcely reaching three-quarters of that speed, he clocks in at just over 70. His crucial opening gambit sounds like a giant industrial machine whirring into life. It shocks with its slowness, its merciless weight so mighty it’s as if time itself, rather than the music, has slowed down, crushing all in its path. For nearly 10 minutes, this is Beethoven as process, all of its cogs grinding as audibly as in any of the conductor’s Webern. “I simply cannot believe,” Trevor Harvey wrote in Gramophone in 1970, that “Beethoven meant it to go like this.” Reflecting later, Mr. Boulez said, “I would probably take that rather faster,” but he also argued that conductors “took off like bats out of hell in the first movement,” diminishing its weight. “Certain things set one off,” he recalled of their eagerness. A sense of experimentation dominates the rest of the work, as if it were new music itself. Mr. Boulez maintains his steely, almost militaristic approach in the last three movements, his speeds more ordinary but still imbued with density and immovability. In the scherzo, heft sits uneasily alongside sharp accents and rustic flavors. Even the finale operates rather than sweeps away, with Mr. Boulez’s precise balances allowing crucial woodwind contributions to be heard, everything phrased insistently in fours, transformed. Is this relative restraint what is called for here? Probably not. To my ears, the recording sounds less like an ardent political statement — in 1968 of all years — than a mouthing of disbelieved slogans. Perhaps it’s a demonstration of the argument that “the dreams of the future will never again ... take shape in this landscape,” as Mr. Boulez wrote of Beethoven The box’s 66 other CDs are a reminder of the breadth of Mr. Boulez’s repertoire. Many also distort how progressive his time at the New York Philharmonic really was. To look back at the programs he constructed — all now visible online through the orchestra’s valuable Remarkably, Mr. Schonberg reported that ticket sales in the Boulez era averaged 97 percent of capacity, although we should not draw a straight line from his adventure to any commercial success. Sony’s boxed set contains important recordings with the Philharmonic ranging from Berlioz and Falla to Bartok and Stravinsky, but almost none of the repertoire he used to balance his modernism. Most of the works Mr. Boulez presented from the “museum” — his metaphor for a canon he could constantly rearrange and escape from — were never recorded commercially, including Bach, Mozart, and Mendelssohn, as well as riskier fare like Gabrieli, Rameau and countless of Mr. Boulez’s own contemporaries. Mr. Schonberg wrote that when Mr. Boulez performed the works of many of those composers, “the results could be catastrophic.” Mr. Boulez himself admitted in his interviews with Mr. Vermeil that he “felt no affinity” with many of them. But that was not always the case, and as we assess Mr. Boulez’s legacy, as surely we will, we should know for ourselves. Are his takes on these pieces forever lost? Let’s hope not. Most of Mr. Boulez’s concerts with the Philharmonic were recorded as radio broadcasts. Asked whether there was any possibility of that archival hoard being released, Katherine E. Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Philharmonic, said that the material was unlikely to be released commercially. But the Philharmonic is developing plans to release sections of its audio collection as part of the Perhaps those recordings, like those in Sony’s set, will serve to undermine reigning preconceptions of Mr. Boulez as the cold, dispassionate thinker heard by Mr. Schonberg and others in the 1970s. More important, through the work of a man who