Conductor David Robertson on Boulez and Audiences [Cowen]

Tyler Cowen, David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation, Conversations with Tyler, Episode 248, July 9, 2025.

What the conversation is about:

David Robertson is a rare conductor who unites avant-garde complexity with accessibility. After serving as music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Pierre Boulez’s storied contemporary-music ensemble, he went on to rejuvenate the St. Louis Symphony. Robertson combines a fearless approach to challenging scores with a deep empathy for audiences.

Tyler and David explore Pierre Boulez’s centenary and the emotional depths beneath his reputation for severity, whether Boulez is better understood as a surrealist or a serialist composer, the influence of non-Western music like gamelan on Boulez’s compositions, the challenge of memorizing contemporary scores, whether Boulez’s music still sounds contemporary after decades, where skeptics should start with Boulez, how conductors connect with players during a performance, the management lessons of conducting, which orchestra sections posed Robertson the greatest challenges, how he and other conductors achieve clarity of sound, what conductors should read beyond music books, what Robertson enjoys in popular music, how national audiences differ from others, how Robertson first discovered classical music, why he insists on conducting the 1911 version of Stravinsky’s Petrushka rather than the 1947 revision, and more.

On working with Boulez:

Robertson: 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.

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.

African influence:

Robertson: This is a constant — the African masks and Picasso and Braque, and the whole idea of changing the perspective of things in Cubism. There’s so much in Pierre’s music that is about his paying attention and listening all the time, whether it’s to Scottish bagpipes, to work out this idea of “Oh wait, the chanter has all of these tiny little notes that it plays and they have very specific rules for how they play these. I like this idea and I’m going to bring it into my music.”

Time:

Robertson: [...] composers use two basic ideas when they’re going to notate their music. One is to take a certain amount of time and subdivide it. This would be like [finger snapping and vocables]. There are many composers who do that. Then there’s the idea that you have, say, a group of eighth notes or sixteenth notes that form an underlying pulse. This is very much coming from the Indian subcontinent. You have this thing going [vocables].

That’s why the notation in Trois petites liturgies, which comes from the second movement of Olivier Messiaen, requires those differing time signatures, because otherwise, if you measure it by a grid, everything else that doesn’t fit in the grid becomes a syncopation. There’s nothing wrong with this. This is what is so wonderful about the grid that jazz players are able to manufacture, where there’s so much push and pull with the grid, and that’s, actually, where a great deal of the energy comes from.

Audiences:

Cowen: You conducted for some number of years in Sydney. How are Australian audiences different?

Robertson: Oh, that’s a really good thing to talk about because I think all audiences are different. There are certain cultural aspects. I just came back from a European tour. The amount of applause you get from European audiences is sometimes surprising to Americans. I remember having to tell some American soloists when we’d come out for the seventh time, and they’d already played their encore, that the audience still wanted to see them again, in Lyon. You have a standing ovation in Carnegie Hall and you come out twice and then it’s over.

In Sydney, there is a sense of adventure. There’s also a sense of pride in their institutions that you don’t necessarily find in every place. There’s enough newness about the country that the idea that it’s the Sydney Symphony Orchestra is already a source of pride before you’ve even started to play.

There’s that, but I think the more important point is that an audience anywhere is a collection of individuals. We play a concert for one individual, but for economic reasons, we just get 2,000 individuals together at the same time because it’s cost effective, but each person brings their own sense of what’s there and their experience with them. This goes back to what you were saying about people hearing contemporary classical music and going, “Ick.”

That has to do with, have they played an instrument? When they’ve played an instrument, are they the kind of person who likes to make funny sounds on the instrument? Or do they want to stick with only what’s in the Tune A Day book? If they’re the person who liked to honk and make strange sounds to annoy their siblings, they’re probably going to be closer to contemporary music, and they bring that with them into the concert hall.

You have people who are there to celebrate a fantastic, “I just met this person and I invited them to the concert and they said, yes. Oh, this is great. Can I put my arm around them during the Tchaikovsky?” You have people who come in, and they are still in a situation of bereavement. You have people who come in, and they have looked at something in the news that has disturbed them greatly.

All of these people come in, all of them as individuals, and our job, I think, is to create the most open experience possible so that each one of these people feels they can come into the structure of the music in a way that they can then find themselves and have the incredible experience that it can bring forth, talk to them.