The Chicago Symphony Orchestra will celebrate the life and work of Pierre Boulez, the esteemed composer and conductor who will turn 90 in March, with a brand-new Beyond the Score production of "A Pierre Dream: A Portrait of Pierre Boulez," on November 14 and 16 at Symphony Center.
Boulez is the CSO's Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus. He was one of the early supporters of the CSO's Beyond the Score series, which weaves together live music and multimedia elements to delve into the history and creation of a particular masterpiece or the works of a particular composer.
Boulez himself has been closely involved in the creation of "A Pierre Dream," a kaleidoscopic play of music, words and imagery designed to shed light on Boulez's creative process and the multitude of influences on him as a creative artist. Noted architect Frank Gehry, who is a longtime friend of Boulez's, contributed the stage design for the production.
At the heart of this production is an ensemble of CSO musicians playing some of Boulez's most famous and influential works, directed by guest conductor Pablo Heras-Casado.
I recently spoke with Gerard McBurney, creative director of Beyond the Score, projection designer Mike Tutaj and principal percussionist Cynthia Yeh about this multimedia exploration of Boulez's life and music that defies categorization.
Because the show includes extensive documentary footage of Boulez speaking about his own work, some might think it is a documentary, a label which McBurney and Tutaj both reject.
"The word documentary is a dangerous word, because I don't think it accurately describes what we're doing," Tutaj said.
A documentary is a form of biography, telling a more or less linear story, Tutaj explained, whereas A Pierre Dream is "...this sort of dreamscape of his life in different fragments, that don't tell a linear story, that course through decades, that course through ideas and influences."
"What we get, if you like, is a journey through Boulez's imagination," McBurney said.
It is a journey through words and images as well as music. "The whole business of how you weave what you look at into what you hear, and how you weave words and music together, is to me a very interesting one, especially since it is an interweaving of different ways of communicating which has been much cheapened in our culture," McBurney remarked.
Think of most music videos, TV ads and Hollywood movies to get an idea of what McBurney is talking about.
"It becomes a way of just popularizing something, or making it "easier", and I'm not particularly interested--I don't believe that people need things made easier; what they need is things made more unexpected, fresher, more interesting, more engaging," he said.
One of the ways McBurney intends to do this is by using a multitude of voices to explore the multitude of influences on Boulez's complex music.
"The essential point about all these extra means, is the way they enable us to develop what the great theorists of the early 20th century used to call polyphony," he explained. "By which they don't just mean the voices in a Bach fugue, although that's where polyphony comes from. They mean the polyphony you get in a novel by Dostoyevsky, where you have many many voices, some of which are voices of the characters, but others are voices of ideas which weave in and out."
McBurney's purpose is not to draw attention away from the music, or make it in any way secondary to the words and images. "These shows are deeply about what musicians do, and how people play instruments, and what the instruments sound like," he said. "And if you turn them into the accompaniment to a movie, you're downgrading them, as you do in the opera house--you're putting them down in the pit."
Not that it would be easy to draw attention away from Boulez's music. According to principal percussionist Cynthia Yeh, Boulez set the standards high for all future composers, and many of the percussion effects he asked for in his music have become the norm. "The mallet parts are some of the most challenging and intricate mallet parts ever written," she said. "I think he set the standards so high that composers following that thought, 'well, Boulez wrote it, and people played it, so you [percussionists] should be able to play it.'"
More information about the CSO's production of "A Pierre Dream" is available at cso.org.
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