Call it a good-news-bad-news scenario, with an extra blast of good news attached. When the CAMA concert season was announced about a year ago, there was much excitement among those of us who crave contemporary and/or modern (as in the past century) repertoire, learning that the annual Los Angeles Philharmonic program would include music of the famed late French composer/conductor Pierre Boulez. This is the 100th birthday year of the composer (1925-2016), and it would have been a timely local occasion.
Alas, it is not to be. Although the previously promised Boulez and Debussy program, with L.A. Phil emeritus maestro Esa-Pekka Salonen and noted pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard (a Boulez specialist, by the way, among other strong points), will be performed in L.A.’s Disney Hall on Thursday and over the weekend, their Friday, May 9, night visit to the Granada arrives Boulez-less. Instead, Friday’s concert now features Debussy with Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3 and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 — a strong package in its own right.
The program shift came from the L.A. Phil, who reportedly were concerned about the stage not being ample enough to suit this special dance-enhanced concert — despite CAMA’s countering that the problem could be resolved with the Granada’s stage extensions. But a perhaps paranoid interpretation of the switch supports the idea that Boulez’s famously sophisticated mode of serial music — not a crowd-pleasing body of work, generally — has faced a veritable moratorium in Santa Barbara. The closest he has come is the worldly 805 outpost of the Ojai Music Festival, where he has been much celebrated and hosted as a memorable artistic director on a few occasions.