David Robertson: evaluation

Transcript context

…His music is very emotional. Do you think he’s more properly thought of as a surrealist composer rather than a serialist? I think that because he doesn’t wear, or never wore, his emotion on his sleeve in any way that many people — and also with this extraordinary emphasis on precision that was connected with his performing One of the headlines in a New York paper announcing his arrival at the New York Philharmonic was “The Iceman Cometh. ” I think there’s that sense of things. While I can understand where that came from, I never really saw that side of him. In fact, what was fascinating doing a number of his works — I remember in Japan, I was lucky enough to fall into the opportunity to give the world premiere of Explosante-fixe, and that was because he had knee problems. So, the tour that we had made for Italy and Germany — he was just not going to be able to do because of waiting around for airplanes, and it was extremely painful. I got to rehearse the piece with him in the hall, right behind all of the computers. I heard him rehearse it first with the ensemble and work things out. That was fascinating, both to see someone working with players and have a clarinet player say, “This actual tremolo between these two notes doesn’t work very well.” To have the man that I would think of as supremely knowledgeable about writing for instruments say, “Oh, well, if we did this one, would it work better?” And the player says, “Yes, sure, that’s fine.” To see this kind of flexibility with his own works, and then to be up in front, conducting and having the computer create the sounds in real time based on the information that the MIDI flute was giving it. For me to say, “Pierre, I think it’s actually just a little too fast for us to be able to — ” and he said, “Oh, just a minute. Just a minute. We’ll make the calculations.” He calculated everything so it would be slightly slower. I turned with some chagrin to the ensemble and said, “Do you know how we recalculate the tempo?” And I just gave an upbeat. This was one of the things that we worked on together in a sense. It was very close collaboration. But then about two years later for a big birthday celebration in Tokyo, I was doing a performance of it in Kioi Hall. We got to the slow central passage of Transitoire VII, which is the first movement of Explosante-fixe, and I remember thinking, “This is so incredibly sensual, and it sounds so beautiful in this hall, I’m going to really push the envelope.” I think Pierre’s tempo marking is ♩=40, which is quite slow, but I was down almost at the double of that, like ♪=40. It was the most unbelievably seductive Ravelian sound that you could imagine. After the rehearsal, Pierre was there, and I went up to him, and I said, “Pierre, I’m very sorry. I really indulged in this little section.” He said, “No, no, no, no, you can actually do more.” That was the moment where I realized he has no problem when the emotion is put into his works in an immensely intense way, but he is not able to do that himself as a performer. can actually do more.” That was the moment where I realized he has no problem when the emotion is put into his works in an immensely intense way, but he is not able to do that himself as a performer. There are a lot of his works where I have done things in his presence, which he doesn’t do, and you won’t find it on his recordings. He said, “Oh, yes, that’s really very nice. That’s lovely.” It’s a fascinating question, this one of how does one express emotion and how comfortable is one with emotions in public.…

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