Boulevard Night in Paris

The London Symphony Orchestra has a rich history, going back to the era of Albert Coates and to when Sir Edward Elgar and Richard Strauss conducted them. Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein made memorable recordings with the LSO during their lifetimes. The orchestra seems to like working with composers. I first conducted them back in the 1990’s in scenes from “The Death of Klinghoffer,” and I have been lucky to return on numerous occasions, each time finding the band ever more flexible and quick on the uptake. In 2001 we spent four intense days in the studios of Abbey Road, recording the entire “Klinghoffer” score for the movie directed by Penny Woolcock. That was emotionally draining, because the day before we began recording this opera about terrorism and assassination was September 11th.

In 2007 I led the LSO again, this time in the London premiere of “A Flowering Tree” at the Barbican, and we made one of my favorite recordings from those performances. A decade or more earlier they’d made the first recording of my Violin Concerto with Gidon Kremer as soloist. Of the handful of really great orchestras in the world, the LSO must surely have the lowest median age. Many of their players look like they’re barely out of music school or college. But they play with a mixture of warm, rich sound and astonishing ensemble precision. It’s helps that their home is the Barbican Theater, a stage on which it’s actually possible for the players to hear each other and make laser-quick adjustments. This is not always the case with concert halls, many of which present impossible acoustical obstacles for players to hear what their cohorts are doing on the other side of the stage.

The LSO is a self-governed ensemble. Unlike most orchestras, particularly those in the US, where the management and the music director make most of the repertory and artistic decisions and the players simply show up and play what’s one their stands that day, the LSO players, like their colleagues in the Berlin Philharmonic, take an active role in all artistic decisions. They don’t have a single, overbearing, all-powerful “music director,” but rather they invite favored conductors to come and collaborate with them. The wildly imaginative and talented Russian Valery Gergiev and the distinguished octogenarian Colin Davis are their principal conductors, but neither has the dominating authority that he would have with, for instance, an American orchestra. On the other hand, if the orchestra plays exceptionally well (or noticeably poorly) the players, not the conductor, take the credit or absord the blame. As one player said to me, “we take responsibility for how we play.”

Leonard Bernstein conducted them on several occasions toward the end of his career. After retiring from the New York Philharmonic in 1970 he preferred mostly to work in Vienna (where, irony of ironies, his main accomplishment seems to have been convincing this orchestra players of the value of their own Gustav Mahler). But he liked the LSO, and he even made a recording of “The Rite of Spring” with them. That was back in the days when record jacket designers seemed to be competing with each other as to who could inhale the biggest toke before sitting down to design a new album.

Did Lennie, in his performance with the LSO, conduct the final scene, the pounding, asymmetrical “Danse sacrale,” in the metrically simplified version that Nicholas Slonimsky had prepared for Bernstein’s mentor, Serge Koussevitsky? I don’t know. I’ve heard that Bernstein had learned it in that simpler version back in his Tanglewood days and continued to do it throughout his career. But, if this was indeed the case, I have no doubt it was not for fear of the challenge of the original version. Bernstein could handle tricky rhythms as well as any conductor of his era.

You can see Bernstein conduct the LSO in his Candide Overture HERE. But this is an unfair clip to have floating around the Internet. He looks physically in pain, and the famously supple, lithe body movements that made his conducting such a perfectly choreographed representation of the music’s shape are missing here.

My two weeks with the LSO are over, ending last night with a concert in the Salle Pleyel here in Paris, and I will miss them. We have a nice chemistry, and I love how they play my stuff.

The difficult exigencies of touring were at play here in Paris: although it had been four days since we last did the program in London, the management of Salle Pleyel could only spare us an hour to refresh ourselves with the difficult repertoire and to get used to the hall with its tricky, ultra-live acoustics. And within that hour, we had to take ten minutes to reset the stage for the Stravinsky Piano Concerto. Nonetheless, the orchestra played wonderfully. Doing the Stravinsky with Jeremy Denk was pure pleasure. He seems to be able to play anything, making it feel effortless and finding the essence of what the composer imagines. In his hands the piece felt urbane, cheeky, mixing the wit and stylishness of the outer movements with the elevated lyricism of the Bach-inspired cantilenas of the slow movement. Jeremy, who last year rolled out a recital consisting of the “Concord Sonata” and the “Hammerklavier,” is now preparing another that will pair the Ives First Sonata with the Goldberg Variations.

What did the Parisian audience, used to European modernism when they hear music by a living composer, think of “CITY NOIR” with its strange LA vibes and titles like “The Song is for You” and “Boulevard Night”? Hard to know. They kept calling the conductor back onstage for more bows to the point where he had to take the exhausted players off by force. Perhaps they were appreciative of a visit by one of the world’s great orchestras, no matter what it played. Or maybe they were just happy the concert was over so they could, like the rest of us, go out for a good meal.

In the taxi at 1:00 AM we pass down a street near where Marcel Proust had grown up. I think about how France, such an overflowing garden of creativity at the turn of the twentieth century, is now best known for its wordy, contentious critiques, given to parsing “meaning” in place of creating it. The Ravels and Prousts, the Mallarmés and Valerys; the Debussys, Renoirs; the Hugos and Balzacs—-all those brave, sensual, illuminated souls have given way to the scions of Derrida, and of Lyotard and Foucault.

But they still know how to cook and take such good care of their cobblestone streets and excellent museums.