MUSIC : Pianist Cheng Crusades for Boulez, New Music

If composer Pierre Boulez has gotten a bad reputation, blame it on some performers, says Southwest Chamber Music Society pianist Gloria Cheng.

“For those who think of (Boulez) as a cold, calculating, mathematical, French elitist kind of composer, it could be the performers that should take the blame,” Cheng said in a recent phone interview from her home in West Los Angeles.

“There are cold, unfeeling performances of his music on LP,” said Cheng, who will be playing two Boulez works in a program Thursday by the Southwest Chamber Music Society at Chapman University.

“But performers are better equipped to play his music now. I just hope the public won’t be dissuaded by those recordings. There is so much passion in his music, in everything he does.”

A brilliant theorist, composer and conductor, Boulez took the lead among the post-Webern serialists by the late ‘40s, pushing the techniques toward a total control of all the elements of music--dynamics, rhythm, duration, timbre--in addition to pitch.

He was not above deliberately generating controversy, however. In 1952, he penned a notoriously hostile and polemical obituary of Schoenberg, who had died the year before. Entitled “Schonberg est mort” (Schoenberg is dead), the essay took that composer to task for failing to pursue his own theories to what Boulez felt was their logical conclusion: a complete revolution in the way music is structured.

Boulez also damned his contemporaries who had not gotten aboard the then-politically correct 12-tone bus:

“Any musician who has not felt--we do not say understood but indeed felt--the necessity of the serial language is USELESS,” he wrote in an article for a music journal, the Revue Musicale, in 1951.

Not surprisingly, Boulez’s tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic (1971-77) ruffled feathers among audiences and critics, particularly his emphasis upon major 20th-Century composers instead of the traditional 19th-Century repertory. He was succeeded by Zubin Mehta.

But in 1974, with a huge subsidy provided by the French government to found the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique in Paris, Boulez found his metier.

He repaired there at the end of his New York experience. He has since continued his experimental writing in addition to guest conducting for various orchestras.

The two works on the Southwest program are both early pieces, however. “Notations” dates from 1945, when Boulez was 20. The Sonatine for flute and piano was composed a year later.

Cheng encountered the 12-part “Notations” at a recital by Maurizio Pollini in Paris in 1989.

“They were so effective,” she said. “I had to get my hands on them. I traced them down in some obscure little shop in Paris.”

They were difficult to find because Boulez had withdrawn the work from his catalogue. He later reissued the first four of the 12 pieces in an orchestrated version in 1980. The original keyboard score became available again in 1985.

“I don’t know why there was a delay,” Cheng said.

Cheng described the pieces as “sort of variations of each other. They tend to be sparse, not terribly demanding, except for one which is a monster, and epigrammatic.

“There are actually techniques that he later abandoned, such as a melody with left-hand accompaniment. Imagine! Boulez the renegade.”

Cheng called the Sonatine “just a good kind of scherzo” between flute and piano. The two players “support each other characterwise. There is a complete intertwining of the parts and shared material.”

Born in Teaneck, N.J., Cheng, who states her age only as “middle-late 30s,” joined the Los Angeles-based Southwest Chamber Music Society in 1989.

“They give me so many different kinds of opportunities,” she said. “They fulfill a lot of my dreams of a wonderful ensemble to be with, playing not only chamber music but solos as well.”

Through her work with local new-music groups and as a keyboardist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Cheng also has worked with Boulez.

“That’s been probably the highlight of my entire musical life,” she said. “He taught me so much.”

Still, she says that the lack of popular acceptance of new music “eats away at me.

“I play it more because I have to do it. I feel if I can go out as a kind of missionary and sell some more people on this stuff, because I believe in it so deeply, it’s a wonderful thing for me to be doing.”

Cheng agrees that much of that music is difficult.

“When I look at some of the scores, I say to myself, ‘Jeez, do I really have to learn this? Do I have the patience?’ Then, six months later, after I’ve toiled on it, something clicks, and I understand that composer’s world. My world is expanded. Ninety-nine per cent of the time, I am really thankful for having done it because I come into a musical experience or a musical world that I never knew existed, never imagined.

“Until the point where it’s under my fingers, just to that point, it’s just pure sweat. Then I have a breakthrough and discovery.

“If I can illuminate that piece for someone who has never heard it before or never imagined anything sounding like that, then I’ve done something good. That’s what I hope happens at a concert of this kind of music.

“That’s what keeps me going--the chance to expand someone else’s world the way my world has been expanded in taking on the challenge of a new work.”

* Gloria Cheng and other members of the Southwest Chamber Music Society will play works by Pierre Boulez, Varese and Debussy on Thursday at 8 p.m. in Bertea Hall at Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell Ave., Orange. $7 to $14. (714) 997-6871.

BAROQUE LINEUP: The 12th annual Baroque Festival of Corona del Mar opens June 7 at with a program of concertos by Marcello, Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Soler and other composers. Festival music director Burton Karson will conduct the concert at St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church, 3233 Pacific View Drive.

The five-concert series will continue on June 8 with a recital at the same site by organist Samuel John Swartz at 8 p.m.; programs at Sherman Library and Gardens, 2645 East Coast Highway, on June 10 and 12 at 8 p.m.; and a choral finale back at the church on June 14 at 4 p.m.

Choral works by Mexican composer Manuel de Zumaya and the Moxo Indians of Bolivia will be on the June 10 program. Harpsichordist Malcolm Hamilton will appear with Tod Frank, recorder, and Kevin Plunkett, cello, on June 12. The final program will include a Scarlatti Magnificat and Vivaldi’s “Beatus Vir.”

Information: (714) 760-7888 or write the Baroque Music Festival, Box 838, Corona del Mar, Calif., 92625.