A hugely succesful failure

ELLIOTT CARTER and PIERRE BOULEZ at Avery Fisher Hall before the 'Informal Evening' performance of Carter's Concerto for Orchestra on 11 February 1974

From most New York Philharmonic subscribers there was a sigh of relief when Pierre Boulez left the orchestra.  ...  [R]eliable reports have it that nobody was happier than the front office when Mr. Boulez went to Paris for good.
HAROLD C. SCHONBERG, Facing the Music, Simon and Schuster, 1981, p.362.
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What could have so upset the front office folks about Pierre Boulez' tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic?
     Was it Boulez's introduction of Rug Concerts and other unconventional concert formats such as Informal Evenings?  Not likely given that Boulez's Rug Concerts "played to a full house that greeted each piece with unrestrained enthusiasm"[1], and the series proved to be "enormously successful"[2].
     Was it because of decreased attendance due to Boulez's insistence on performing a substantial amount of 20th century modernist music?  Again not likely because the attendance rate at the Philharmonic was at 96% of capacity in Boulez's third year[3], rising to 99% in his last year, with the average over his entire tenure (1971-1977) being 97% [4].  This is slightly better than the 96% attendance rate under Boulez's successor Zubin Mehta[5], and vastly better than the 78-88% attendance rate during the tenure of the ridiculously overpaid Lorin Maazel three decades later[6].

With this in mind, I'm inclined to think that Harold Schonberg was simply full of shit, and his allusions to (unnamed) "reliable sources" and the (statistically invisible) aggrieved majority of Philharmonic subscribers are nothing more than a feeble attempt to camouflage his own intense dislike of post-war musical avant-garde and of Boulez as its most influential spokesman.  If I'm right, this is one example to support my view of Schonberg as a superb music writer - one whose books I re-read periodically for the sheer pleasure of their Hemingwayesque directness and powerfully projected personality - who also happened to be a spectacularly limited and biased music critic.

Perhaps a more telling example is Schonberg's review[7] of Boulez's 1974 subscription concert whose program - in addition to works by Boyce, Mozart, and Debussy - featured Elliott Carter's Concerto for Orchestra.  All that Schonberg had to say about the Carter work itself consisted of exactly one sentence: It is fully representative of the composer's hectic atonality, complicated structural relationships and seriousness of purpose.  Not a word about Boulez's interpretation of the work, not a word about how the Philharmonic's musicians coped with the Concerto's technical challenges.  On the other hand, a trivial Concerto Grosso by William Boyce elicited a full paragraph, as did Debussy's already numbingly familiar Iberia.  Finally, the Mozart C minor piano concerto, with Christoph Eschenbach as soloist, was given two full paragraphs (nearly half of the entire review), equally divided between remarks on the concerto itself (sophisticated harmonies, piano layout) and Eschenbach's execution of the solo part (precious phrasing, détaché fingering).
     Now, Mozart is one of the good guys of art music, true, but who the fuck needs to read two paragraphs worth of vague and useless remarks about Wolfi's "sophisticated harmonies" or "piano layout that belongs to a different world"?  As of 1974 Mozart's concertos had been played for nearly two centuries by every notable pianist, from Hummel and Beethoven to Schnabel, Serkin, and Edwin Fischer.  The 1974 performance of the Carter work, by contrast, was its first return since the premiere (under Bernstein) four years earlier.  And it was conducted by a man universally acknowledged as a supreme interpreter of contemporary music!  No wonder Schonberg's one-sentence 'review' of the performance continues to rankle.  Not as much as his newspaper's past glorification of Stalin's monstrous totalitarian U.S.S.R. or its current vilification of U.S. Federal immigration laws, but still...

It is impossible to know what Boulez's audience heard at this or the other two subscription concerts at which he conducted the Carter work.  Fortunately, Boulez and the Philharmonic also performed this work at the Informal Evening concert on 11 February 1974, and that performance was recorded for future broadcast.[8]  Noticeably slower than Berlin performances recorded during the Philharmonic's 1975 European Tour (and issued on CD as part of the Philharmonic's special edition box set), the 1974 performance sounds a little tentative by comparison, and certainly is not as thrillingly propulsive and dynamically volatile as the much later studio recording by the (augmented) London Sinfonietta conducted by Oliver Knussen (my favorite interpreter of Carter's music).  Yet the performance still vividly communicates layers of intricate detail and a good deal of the characteristic playfulness with which Carter contrasts and collides various instrumental groups.  Compared to Bernstein's rather perfunctory and sketchy (and dimly engineered) official studio recording with the same orchestra, Boulez's mastery of the work seems little short of awesome, especially in light of the orchestra's lack of experience with (and rumored hostility toward) avant-garde music.

As far as I know, this 1974 recording of the Concerto has never been broadcast until a week ago (Alec Baldwin's smarmy voice can be hard in the end announcement).

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1.  "Rug Concerts resume", New York Times, 13 June 1974.
2.  "For Good Listening Why Not Try the Philharmonic's Floor?", New York Times, 30 June 1974.
3.  Billboard, 9 November 1974.
4.  "Summing Up the Boulez New York Era", New York Times, 15 May 1977.
5.  "Why isn't the Philharmonic better?", New York Times, 19 September 1982.
6.  New York Philharmonic 2007 Annual Report.
7.  "Music: Case of the Curious Cadenza", New York Times, 9 February 1974.
8.  The date of the recording is not specified in the Philharmonic broadcast.  I conjectured the Informal Evening performance as its source not only because the Concerto was the only work on the program and was performed twice (with discussion between the two performances), but also because of the remarkably quiet audience, which would be unusual for a regular subscription concert featuring a very difficult contemporary composition.