David Robertson: preference

Transcript context

…Cognitively, can you memorize these scores — or shall I call them tunes — the way you could with Beethoven or Brahms? Or is that just impossible for everyone? When I first got to the Ensemble Intercontemporain, which was 1991, this is unusual in that I think they were probably desperate to find a music director. Peter Eötvös had said, “No, I am not going to extend anymore.” So, Pierre happened to find me. The interesting thing was, he nominated me and gave me the job as music director. I had never conducted the ensemble before. That was slightly daunting, shall we say, to go in. But what that meant was, that at the end of my first season, we had a tour. We did a fabulous production of Le Marteau sans maître with the ballet of Régine Chopinot, Ballet Atlantique, with this fabulous choreography to Le Marteau sans maître, which meant I needed to conduct it. I came in and I realized that my first Le Marteau sans maître was going to be the 293rd that the ensemble was playing. My first couple of seasons, I felt like I was drinking from a fire hydrant. At the same time, what was interesting working with that group is that they brought the deep knowledge of his chamber music, of his whole repertoire that you might find in a great symphony orchestra with regard to Beethoven. You automatically start imbibing all of these different ideas. What ends up happening is that, for example, for Explosante-fixe — that’s a work that has lots of shifting patterns but it’s written in mosaic form. Sometimes, to help the audience understand that, I will talk to them at the beginning and give musical examples, which requires me to look at the audience with my microphone and conduct the group that is behind me, with the score behind me at the same time. I could do the whole piece by heart. I prefer by heart rather than from memory, because I think the notion is that, like any kind of music, it means so much to you that there’s no way you could forget it, in the same way that you can’t forget your parents’ names because they have volumes of experience and love and connection that are attached to those names. That becomes the same way in a piece that you really love dearly, as some of the Boulez speaks to me. Are the time signatures of these works just crazy?…

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