David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 9 July 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded March 12th, 2025.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,
0:09.4	bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.
0:13.5	Learn more at Mercadis.org.
0:15.7	For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links,
0:20.4	visit Conversationswithtyler.com.
0:26.8	Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler.
0:30.3	Today I'm happy to be here in New York City with David Robertson, who is one of my favorite
0:35.7	classical conductors.
0:37.3	In the year, I think, 2003,
0:39.2	I went to hear David in Paris at Ircom, and I've been thinking about him and what he does
0:44.0	ever since. He served as principal conductor of the ensemble intercontemporane from 1992 to 2000,
0:51.7	has been chief conductor in Sydney, Australia, music director in St. Louis, where he's credited with having revitalized that symphony, and he is very well known for his numerous recordings, including those of John Adams, Pierre Boulez, George Gershwin, and much more. He teaches at Juilliard, and he conducts regularly at the Metropolitan Opera in New York,
1:12.8	and this summer he's conducting with the New York Philharmonic an exciting concert featuring Stravinsky's
1:18.4	Petruscuhn 11 edition. David, welcome. Thank you very much. Now, as we both know, it's the 100th birthday
1:25.9	of Pierre Boulez on March 22nd, and we're
1:28.8	recording just a few days before then, and you studied with Boulas. I didn't actually study
1:34.3	with him. That's, in a sense, that was the benefit of coming to him relatively late. I went to
1:40.7	London to study in 1976 at the Royal Academy of Music.
1:50.2	And, of course, that was when Bules was no longer the chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra,
1:53.6	but he still had a very strong relationship with the organization. So he came a lot, and I got to see all sorts of amazing concerts at a very formative period of my life.
2:02.6	Later on, I figured out how to get into the studio where the BBC Symphony Orchestra rehearses, and so I would go to rehearsals that
2:08.0	he had. And he was always very nice, and he would say hello when he saw, you know, this stranger
	...

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