Geoffrey Newman talks to conductor David Robertson
Californian David Robertson rose to prominence in 1993 upon his selection by Pierre Boulez to lead the Ensemble Intercontemporain (EIC) in Paris for his ability to bring striking clarity and line to the most complex modernist scores. His further contribution was incorporating ‘minimalism’ and, in particular, the works of John Adams into the EIC repertoire. Robertson subsequently became principal conductor of Orchestre Nationale de Lyon (2000-2004), the St. Louis Symphony (2005-2018) and the Sydney Symphony (2014-2019). His current appointment is Director of Conducting Studies, Distinguished Visiting Faculty at the Juilliard School. His principal recordings have been of Boulez, Adams and Messiaen, and both his disc of Adams’s City Noir and the Saxophone Concerto with the St. Louis Symphony (2014) and his recording of the Met production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (2021) have won Grammy awards. This interview, which took place coincident with his Vancouver Symphony Orchestra concert (review here) at the end of January 2026, discusses developments in his career, his love of Boulez, Adams and the variety in modern composition, as well as his unique philosophy of music.
Geoffrey Newman: There is clearly some intrigue as to how you fell under the spell of Pierre Boulez and how this ultimately led to your appointment at Ensemble Intercontemporain (EIC) in 1992. How did this transpire?
David Robertson: Fortunately, Boulez worked with the BBC Symphony in the late 1970s when I was a student at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and I had the opportunity to observe him closely in rehearsals though I did not speak with him. An initial turning point was winning second prize at the Nicolai Malko Competition for Young Conductors in Copenhagen in 1981, which allowed me to become an assistant at Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf and visit other orchestras with a variety of repertoires. Eventually, I secured my first real appointment in the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra in 1985. I had always been interested in the music of our time because of my interest in composition, so I tried quite a few modern, complex scores with the orchestra and steadily built my reputation. I was asked by Radio France to do some work for them, which led to a second big turning point: conducting a successful world premiere of Gérard Grisey’s Le temps et l’écume at the Maison de Radio France in Paris in 1989, an extremely challenging ‘spectral’ piece. Boulez attended, was impressed and ultimately chose me to take over at EIC three years later.
GN: So, your career would be quite different if Boulez never saw you?
DR: Yes, very probably. I was already interested in many types of music, and when you’re starting your career there is often a prejudice that if you do one thing and do it well, that’s the only thing you can do. In fact, I was already known as an early music conductor in Ireland, a late romantic orchestral conductor in Italy and a bel canto specialist in France and Spain. Even at the moment I was named as music director at EIC, I was doing a five-city tour with Marilyn Horne in an all-Rossini programme.
GN: It seems that the EIC position was a dream for you since Boulez was your ‘icon’.
DR: He is an artist who does not have a lot of parallels in modern times. Even beyond the range of his pathbreaking original compositions over a half century, he was someone who could teach and write about music with eloquence and understanding and get others to follow. Then there was the sheer scope of his conducting and recording. Traditionally, [Robert] Schumann might come close in a couple of areas, and Mahler and Schoenberg too. It would be very hard to find someone in the last 100 years who really touched all the bases in the way that Pierre did.
GN: Boulez originally set up EIC as a specific ‘niche’ for modernist music, but your appointment reflected his ongoing idea that it had to be broadened and become less iconoclastic.
DR: Yes, that’s true. For example, I did the first French performance of Dutch composer Louis Andriessen’s De State 19 years after its world premiere. It had never been played in France, but I felt it was an important piece, and many contemporary composers were saying it was a catalyst for their own work. Understandably, the work was not really Pierre’s cup of tea, but he still came up to me after our performance and said, ‘It’s so important that you do this’. I felt a lot of support from him, even on repertoire that he would not likely put in his own programmes. Overall, I ended up doing most of the pieces that EIC had in their repertoire and premiered some of Boulez’s own. His Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna and his Notations are works are I have done many times. Composers like Brian Ferneyhough, György Kurtág, Iannis Xenakis and Luciano Berio were also represented.
GN: The surprising thing was Boulez accepted ‘minimalist’ works into the fold, since he originally dismissed them and modernist complexity is almost the antithesis of American minimalism.
DR: It actually started with my predecessor, Peter Eötvös, the EIC’s first director, who began to introduce works by Steve Reich. My contribution was to further open up the repertoire by introducing John Adams. However, I did not move to Philip Glass since I have always felt that his orchestral works were not his most unique music.
GN: You have an indelible connection to both Steve Reich and John Adams since you worked with both. What extra ingredient does that personal association give for interpreting their scores?
DR: There is no doubt that you have a better understanding of a composer’s work by knowing where they came from and what things are important to them. But this is not a simple problem: what may make a composer worth listening to is that is they attempt to say things that go beyond their immediate personality. That is why an understanding of the deep structure of their scores with their notations and markings is the ultimate guide. Knowing a composer in person only aids in confirming that your structural hunches about their works are correct. I think there is a hermeneutic quality to a score, so even if you don’t know much about the personal life or thoughts of a composer – as with historical composers – the way they organize their musical notation already reveals a large number of choices they have made in trying to transcribe living sound. There’s a vast amount of information there.
GN: You are performing Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No.4, ‘The Inextinguishable’ for us. Are you saying that by understanding Nielsen’s deep structure in the score, you do not really need much more interpretatively? Might you not consult some authentic historical recordings, such as Launy Grøndahl’s HMV account in 1951?
DR: While I still can’t say ‘inextinguishable’ in Danish, I do think there are things that I understand about Danish history and even Danish cooking that allow Nielsen to speak to me in a way that is more informed than if I were conducting a composer whose country I had never visited. All these things can inform what I hope is the best and most open presentation of a piece of music. But no, I have not studied Grøndahl’s interpretation. I am very much guided by the philosophy of Erich Leinsdorf in his book The Composer’s Advocate: A Radical Orthodoxy for Musicians: ‘If we are there as the composer’s advocate, whether the composer is living or not, we are there to defend and explain and make clear the intentions of the composer in the court of public opinion’. That is an important role, and it means that we need to know as much as possible about any composer, whether alive or not.
GN: Your position is a bit of a challenge for any philosopher of aesthetics. On the one hand, you seem to suggest that the score is an architectural bible that can be understood independent of any external context (Structural Essentialism). On the other, you seem to suggest that the interpretation of the work can be improved by knowledge of outside conditions or cultural/historical attributes (Interpretative Relativism). You presumably draw the line when it comes to strict biographical determinism: that a faithful interpretation of the score requires an understanding of the composer’s frame of mind at the time that they wrote it?
DR: Biographical information can help to give you some general ideas and feelings, but knowing how a composer felt for a given day or month when a work was being written means almost nothing. Referring to Schubert’s sadness or [Robert] Schumann’s mental instability or even Beethoven’s deafness adds little to our understanding of the structures they created. I like to say that the first composition that Mozart wrote after his father died was ‘A Musical Joke’.
GN: Many have classified John Adams as a ‘minimalist’ from the early period of Shaker Loops; then ‘post-minimalist’ from Harmonielehre; and perhaps something else with recent pieces like Must the Devil have All the Good Tunes? and his subsequent piano concertos. What is your view of Adams’s evolution?
DR: I think John Adams was initially taught in the same way that many conservatory and university students were taught in the 70s, and his early pieces were a reaction against that tradition, particularly serialism. This is much the same experience as Steve Reich had ten years earlier. What you see in Adams’s development is his realization of the need to create specific types of compositional tools that can be developed and applied generally and in a way that really satisfied both his creativity and his aesthetic. Whereas his training would have stressed that a composer should always move in the direction of more complexity, Adams advocated going the other way. But that does not imply that a composer who uses seemingly simple constructional algorithms does not have sophisticated and complex ideas behind them. The difference is that the complexity is hidden outside the score rather than within it, which make the pieces more accessible.
People may talk about different stages of Adams’s development but, in many ways, I think that is misleading. The main thing that you find in every single one of his pieces is that it is a journey through a landscape. And as you proceed, you see similar types of trees and hills and mountains. And the further you go on this journey, the more you start to slowly notice that the landscape has changed. This is the evolution in all his pieces. Probably the clearest example is something like A Guide to Strange Places, but taken at a more macro level, I would say that the transformations between material that you see in Shaker Loops are fundamentally the same as the transformations you see in the recent Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? It is only that in the latter the language has evolved in such a way that some of the events may strike you as happening more quickly.
GN: So you prefer to stress the structural invariance in Adams rather than the factors which might have led ‘the language to evolve’, and the learning process that might have been behind it.
DR: Yes, simply because the person who writes a piece at age 20, as far as a driver’s license is concerned, is the same person at age 70. We might look at them and say, no, they are not the same person – but it is still the same DNA. If you look at Beethoven and compare his first piano sonatas with Op.111, or his Op.18 quartets with his ‘late’ quartets, your immediate reaction is that he was a much different composer when older. Yet you still recognize that all these works are by one unique composer, and that the core ideas of expression and thematic development are the same. On the other hand, if you compare Beethoven’s Op.18 quartets with Haydn’s quartets, you immediately notice that certain choices that Beethoven makes, which Haydn would never dream of making. At the most general level, I do think there are a number of core elements to musical expression for human beings that are redefined in different cultures and for different historical periods over and over, but they are the same core ideas.
GN: You have often talked about the ‘magic’ in live performance, and the desire to construct musical programmes which foster it. Can you explain this?
DR: I think a concert ought to be like an evening at the theater where you have, say, three or four characters on stage, and each says things that make the other characters feel and act a certain way. And some of those characters may be ones we think we are familiar with, such as Antonin Dvořák, but the moment that you put a modernist George Crumb on the stage with Antonin, it suddenly makes Dvořák sound different than you previously thought. While I love to put Adams in my concerts, there are so many other contemporary American composers who I also love to introduce: Steve Mackey, Sarah Kirkland Snyder, Avner Dorman and Elliott Carter. I have conducted Chris Rouse many times. Differences in aesthetic style do not really concern me: the important thing is to ensure that the composition finds a real resonance with the other works on the programme.
GN: We may as well end with a million-dollar question: Pierre Boulez has long received criticism that his performances were too analytical and cerebral to do justice to works other than modernist ones – that the structure was right but the ‘feeling’ was wrong. This criticism is, of course, unjustified if we explore his Bartók, Ravel, Wagner, Schoenberg and some of his Mahler recordings. But it is a criticism that you might have encountered too. What is your response?
DR: All interpreters have their critics and, since Boulez started as a ‘radical’, it would be surprising if he didn’t. In some ways, what ‘beauty’ is in music remains in the eye of the beholder, so one would expect varied opinions on any one conductor or composer. But I do believe music must always be a combination of head and heart: it can’t be just the one without the other.
GN: In closing, I do hope you can record an updated integral set of Adams’s orchestral and concertante works for us. We would all cherish it.
DR: Yes, that would be wonderful. Thank You.
Geoffrey Newman