David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation
Conductor David Robertson, who ran Pierre Boulez’s Ensemble Intercontemporain for nine years, talks with Tyler Cowen — days before Boulez’s centenary — about the emotional man behind the ‘Iceman’ reputation, how a conductor actually leads by listening rather than commanding, why contemporary classical music repels people and how to let them in, and why he insists on the 1911 Petrushka over Stravinsky’s own revision.
Key ideas
- Boulez welcomed emotion he could not himself perform. For all the ‘Iceman Cometh’ severity and the emphasis on precision, Robertson found Boulez untroubled — even encouraging — when others poured intense feeling into his scores; at a Tokyo performance he took a passage to nearly double its marked slowness and Boulez said ‘you can actually do more’. The coldness was a performing manner, not the music.
- Conducting is leadership by listening, not by command. ‘You can only do your job by listening.’ The stick looks like will imposed on others; it is the opposite — the work is harnessing 31 or 90 people’s collective artistry toward one direction, a lesson Robertson draws straight across to management.
- Interpretation is good faith made audible. Take the composer’s reams of detail as deliberate, never willful, and make every written line heard — if Berlioz buries four bassoons under fortissimo trombones, the job is to keep the bassoons from being silenced. Clarity comes from hearing precisely what you want in your head first.
- ‘Contemporary’ is a movable feast. The same piece is cutting-edge to one listener and dated to another; tolerance tracks a person’s ‘comfort with discomfort’. Robertson designs the listening experience around how fast the brain decides ‘for me / not for me’ — front-loading a hard piece with its gentlest passage so newcomers have context before the onslaught.
- Trust the original. Robertson conducts the 1911 Petrushka, not Stravinsky’s 1947 revision, which thinned the orchestration and simplified hard rhythms partly for copyright and conducting fees — losing the Rimsky-Korsakov colour. Boulez, a lifelong reviser of his own works, still told him: with a composer’s output, always trust the original.
Content
The man behind the ‘Iceman’
Robertson came to Boulez late and sideways: he never studied with him, but got into BBC Symphony rehearsals as an anonymous student in 1970s London, too shy to speak. Years later Boulez handed him the Ensemble Intercontemporain despite almost no prior contact and without Robertson ever having conducted the group — a bond Robertson calls not filial but ‘grandfilial’, a grandfather’s forgiving distance. He pushes back on the severe, uncompromising reputation (a New York headline announced Boulez’s Philharmonic arrival as ‘The Iceman Cometh’): it came from a refusal to wear emotion on the sleeve and an extraordinary emphasis on precision, not from any coldness Robertson ever witnessed.
Emotion, precision, and interpreting a composer
The central paradox emerges through the world premiere of Explosante-fixe, which Robertson gave when Boulez’s knee trouble kept him from touring. He watched Boulez rehearse with disarming flexibility — letting a clarinettist tell him a tremolo didn’t work and adjusting on the spot — and conducted the piece with a computer recalculating tempo in real time from a MIDI flute. Two years later, in Tokyo, Robertson took the sensual central passage of Transitoire VII to nearly double its marked slowness; afterwards he apologised for indulging, and Boulez said, ‘No, no, you can actually do more.’ The lesson Robertson draws: Boulez had no problem with intense emotion put into his works, but could not supply it himself as a performer. Composers, he adds, get nervous hearing their own music — ‘like sending your child onto the Little League field’ — and tend to rush or over-energise it, hearing something different from the driver’s seat than from the hall.
Non-Western sources and the notation of rhythm
Asked how he prepares for the gamelan connotations and steel drums in Boulez, Robertson answers ‘both’ — listen to the source, and focus on Boulez. The steel drums (in Sur Incises, the 7th Notation) trace to Boulez as a young man running music for the Renaud-Barrault theatre company on post-war French cultural tours, hearing steel-drum players on a Caribbean beach before mass tourism. It is a French-composer pattern — a gamelan at the Paris Exposition, African masks reaching Picasso and Cubism — of constant attention folded into new work. His shifting time signatures aren’t perversity but a genuine choice between two notational logics: subdividing a fixed span of time, or building from an underlying pulse of small equal notes (a logic Robertson traces through Messiaen to the Indian subcontinent). Force the second into a metric grid and everything off-grid becomes false syncopation — ‘like squishing a beautiful flower into a little glass case’.
Why listen to contemporary classical music
Robertson’s pitch: every artist views the world uniquely, shaped by particular experience — he hears overtone structure vividly, a residue of being ‘a recovering horn player’ — and hopes to say something not said before. ‘Contemporary’ is a movable feast: the same 1950s sonata strikes one listener as new and another, steeped in 60 years of the repertoire, as dated. Tolerance maps onto ‘comfort with discomfort’; some genuinely prefer consonance, others (Cowen among them) feel consonant music today is a cop-out because reality is a trickier, nastier beast that needs an un-apologetic language. To show trainees how fast the verdict forms, Robertson plays a ‘mixtape’ of 2.5-second clips — reggae, AC/DC, Springsteen, a Schubert lied, gamelan, kabuki, sitar — proving the brain decides ‘for me / not for me’ almost instantly, a fact programmers must design around. For a skeptic he prescribes Mémoriale: five minutes, a delightful sound world, and a strong emotional charge, written for a young Ensemble flautist who died suddenly while helping develop the MIDI flute.
The craft of conducting
A conductor doesn’t cheer players up by force — the music does that; the podium’s job is to reflect a great moment back to a room bound by an unwritten rule against turning to look at a colleague who played beautifully. Robertson’s most practical observation: every player looks up at a different, personal instant, and the conductor must learn each one, because that glance is the open ‘window’ a gesture can land through — ‘if the window is closed, you’ll pay for the pane of glass.’ The under-noticed truth is that almost everyone also looks up after playing, to check they’re in the right place, and that private moment is the conductor’s chance to send ‘that was incredible’. A second, less obvious skill: being comfortable looking slightly foolish (the ‘moon-view’ alien seeing one person waving a stick while everyone else saws at instruments). And the manager’s lesson — ‘you can only do your job by listening’ — which Robertson ties to his father, a research engineer who late in life had to get brilliant, un-collaborative scientists moving in one direction.
Clarity of sound and what conductors should read
Robertson once asked Boulez how he achieved such clarity; the answer, prefaced as ever with ‘it’s very simple’, was: hear exactly what you want in your head and you will instinctively do whatever balancing is needed. Robertson adds the interpreter’s half — take the composer’s reams of detail in good faith, assume nothing is willful, and make every line audible; every player is equally important and their viewpoints equally valid, to be synthesised into a unified whole. On reading, he is unexpectedly wide: a childhood struggle with reading (found his way in through the white space of play scripts) left him evangelical about books beyond music. He sets Juilliard students Steiner’s After Babel, Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, and Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow — reading conducting itself as System 1 crunching data while System 2 arrives 50 milliseconds late still believing it’s in charge. The real threat to classical music, he says, is long form against scarce attention; the remedy is to slow down and contemplate the score. What he loves in popular music is surprise, and he refuses earbuds on the street because a random bird-call or squealing brake can shuffle the mental jukebox — music’s gift being to ‘collapse time and collapse space and collapse distance between souls’.
Petrushka and trusting the original
For his November 2025 New York Philharmonic concert Robertson chose the 1911 Petrushka, not the 1947 revision. Stravinsky’s revisions, he explains, were driven partly by practicality and heavily by copyright: post-war he revised works to reclaim rights he’d lost (the endlessly-played Firebird had earned him almost nothing). The 1947 version thins the woodwind, cuts the harps to one, and flattens a hard seven-in-the-time-of-six tempo relation to eighth-equals-eighth — a change Robertson suspects Stravinsky made partly so he could conduct and earn from it, and finds ‘a very sad way of doing things’. Boulez, himself a compulsive reviser who would never send you back to the original of Le Visage nuptial, nonetheless told him that with a composer’s output you should ‘always trust the original’. Robertson holds both truths at once, but for Petrushka the 1911’s Rimsky-Korsakov-rooted colours settle it.
See also
- David Robertson — speaker
- Tyler Cowen — host
- Pierre Boulez — the composer at the centre of the conversation
- Daniel Kahneman — Robertson reads conducting through Thinking, Fast and Slow