Music Reviews : Closing Program of Festival Boulez at Royce Hall

Pierre Boulez remains as formidable a program maker as he is a conductor. His mixing and matching of works from different decades or eras can be studied for their hidden agendas as well as their aural effectiveness. As in his own compositions, Boulez puts together musical menus of complex and faceted character; always, it seems, more goes on than is immediately apparent.

The final program of Festival Boulez--three weekends of Los Angeles Philharmonic performances in Royce Hall at UCLA--followed this pattern. Depending on one’s predilections or prejudices, one could read a number of meanings into these reconsiderations of two early Boulez works (including his 1988 look at “Livre pour cordes”), of Charles Ives’ “Three Places in New England” and of Edgard Varese’s “Ameriques.”

Or, as some in the large crowd Saturday night did, one could opt to enjoy the ride--an eventful two hours in which the Philharmonic, obviously still well-stirred by its monthlong contact with the compelling mind behind the French conductor’s impassive podium manner, played in its more polished and high-energy mode.

“Ameriques” (1926), closing the UCLA festival as a matching bookend to Berio’s “Formazioni” (1987), which opened the series May 13, has joined the mainstream of history since some of those furtive, cult-like performances of the 1960s and ‘70s. The gripping, spacious Saturday performance seemed to savor fresh details of the work’s inner life even as it outwardly piled climaxes upon climaxes.

Similarly, Boulez’s probing but unfinicky reading of the Ives suite restored a sense of wholeness to a piece which some others have mined for its startling moments--playing it for laughs, as it were.

This conductor resists the obvious, of course, and nowhere more than in his own works. His revival of parts I and III (he offered part II last Monday on the Green Umbrella series) of “Improvisations sur Mallarme” on this program let the accumulation of vocal and instrumental detail speak for itself.

The fact is, Boulez’s music may have a reputation for density and impenetrability, but in performance, it works. One can follow it usually without maps or notes, but with only the interested ear.

With soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson the clear-voiced soloist--she sings this music as straightforwardly as if it were “Sempre libera”--the two “Improvisations” moved steadily and engagingly toward their conclusion. If you want to hear all three together, you may choose to travel to the closing concert of the Ojai Festival on Sunday afternoon.