E-Mail This Article to a Friend Iconoclast as icon Conductor/composer Pierre Boulez at 80 BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

Sometimes birthdays are useful. Over the past decade, orchestras, record companies, and concert halls have been celebrating the landmark birthdays of Pierre Boulez, the 20th-century’s greatest musical iconoclast and revolutionary, a man who once called for the destruction of opera houses, a provocative remark for which he was actually dragged from his hotel room in Basel, Switzerland, and arrested — 40 years later, in December 2001 — as a "possible terrorist." Boulez was certainly an intimidating leader of the avant-garde; he questioned even his own great masters, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, and his music is still breaking the academic rules.

But the iconoclast is now an icon, a multiple-Grammy-winning conductor and mentor, no longer feared but admired by the establishment for his performances with the world’s greatest orchestras and chamber musicians, not only of his own work but of the major modernists (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Bartók, Varese) and pre-modernists (Mahler, Berlioz, Wagner) and the mainstream 20th-century French repertoire (Debussy, Ravel, Messiaen). His long-out-of-print recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony remains one of the most challenging to received ideas, yet recently, he’s been performing Haydn with such warmth and elegance, you’d think he must have been born in Vienna.

On March 26, Boulez turns 80, and to celebrate that event, Deutsche Grammophon has released four new recordings of Boulez conducting Mahler (three song cycles), Bartók (the three piano concertos), and his own work, plus young Finnish piano virtuoso Paavali Jumppanen playing Boulez’s three early and still-daunting piano sonatas. At Carnegie Hall, there was a weekend of Boulez conducting Mahler, Stravinsky, and Boulez with the London Symphony Orchestra that included a "Discovery" evening devoted to a lecture demonstration of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps (which Boulez refers to only in English, as The Rite of Spring or the Rite). At the final event, the one I attended, he participated in a pre-concert talk with Carnegie Hall’s artistic adviser, Ara Guzelimian.

Boulez has certainly mellowed into affability, elegance, even witty self-denigration. When Guzelimian said he would play an excerpt from Boulez’s very first recording (on Nonesuch) of Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments, Boulez wondered whether it was "to see how bad it is." He’s not, he says, in the habit of listening to his old recordings. ("Too narcissistic — and I am not narcissistic at all.") Surprised after hearing the excerpt, he admitted, "It’s not that bad."

My concert was elegantly organized around shorter and longer, smaller and larger works, different in size and scale, but each work put together on the "mosaic principle" — a series of highly contrasting sections that rub or bump up against one another rather than evolve through continuous development. Boulez began with Dérive 2, his half-hour work for an ensemble of 11 instruments: three strings, three woodwinds, two resonating instruments (piano and harp), two resonating percussion instruments (marimba and vibraphone), and a horn, which exists (and is placed on stage) "somewhere between winds and strings" and which, alone and lonely, both opens and closes the piece. Dérive 2 "derives" from Boulez’s thinking about how Elliott Carter and György Ligeti use time, especially in the latter’s Trio, and from sketches for the shorter and slower Dérive 1 — "a lot of sketches," he told Guzelimian. "Some I don’t use — but I keep them." His compositional practice, he admitted, is "like a boat following currents without direction."

Dérive 2 was written for Carter’s 80th birthday, in 1988. (Backstage after the concert, Carter referred to it as "my piece.") But Boulez is a composer who seldom abandons what he’s working on. The latest version of Dérive 2, from 2002, is much longer than his first version, and he told me, in an interview the morning following the concert, that he was composing another slow section to insert just before the coda. An "incise" he called it, punning on his sur incises, the extraordinary piece that David Hoose led for Collage New Music last month, and that Boulez said is much harder to conduct than Dérive 2, whose speed makes it "dangerous — dangerous but not difficult."

Dérive 2, he said, alternates passages "verging on the chaotic" with passages of great clarity — "traveling" music, he calls this, a term out of vaudeville. (Remember Jackie Gleason’s "A little traveling music, please"?) There’s a sense of "permanent development," frequently interrupted but continuing. The interruptions get longer and longer, then near the end, they get shorter and shorter. "You’re on the verge of not understanding," he told me, "then suddenly, you understand. You don’t have to be afraid of the chaos." He was startled when I mentioned that a friend of mine had compared Dérive 2 to Offenbach; then he got the joke, connecting the remark to the teasing, bubbly "Scherzando" near the end. The challenge here for the conductor is that "you must not miss anything," and the live performance — turbulent, then sublimely contemplative, urgent in its overlapping labyrinths of sound — certainly didn’t miss a trick. The London Symphony Players were as alert to Boulez as his own Ensemble InterContemporain is on the new DG recording, which also includes Dérive 1 and a gorgeous performance of Le marteau sans maître, Boulez’s seminal composition dating from the mid ’50s.