Pierre Boulez (1925-2016)

[ritter]

A heartfelt tribute from the Cleveland Orchestra and musicians associated to it:

https://www.youtube.com/v/h9wH-4p53FY

https://www.youtube.com/v/prijib0JVzQ

https://www.youtube.com/v/_eu52_kH8Q8

https://www.youtube.com/v/xhjrIgw-bTM

[ritter]

Actes Sud and the Philharmonie de Paris will release a 256-page catalogue of the exhibition scheduled to start next month to commemorate Boulez's 90th birthday:



Further info (in French): http://www.actes-sud.fr/catalogue/arts/pierre-boulez

[knight66]

To mark his 90th, the  March BBC Music mag has a good set of articles on Boulez, it covers all the major areas of his output separately, composer, conducter etc.

Mike

[ritter]

The Chiacgo Symphony Orchestra's Beyond the Score series has made available for viewing the taping of the the world premiere of A Pierre Dream: A Portrait of Pierre Boulez, a sort of concert / happening, with stage elements by Frank Gehry, video projections by Mike Tutaj and artistic supervision Gerard McBurney. Pablo Heras-Casado conducts members of the CSO in excerpts from many of Boulez's work.

A Pierre Dream: A Portrait of Pierre Boulez

In about an hour and a half, a fascintaing traversal of Boulez's creative output is made. Very worthwhile, IMHO! 

[San Antone]

This book is now available as a reasonably priced softcover

[asin]1107673208[/asin]

[ritter]

The concert given at Paris's new Philharmonie on February 3, in which the Ensemble Intercontemporain, conducted by Matthias Pintscher and with Marisol Montalvo as soprano soloist, performed Pli selon pli, can be watched on the Arte TV channel's webpage through July 3rd. The second work on the program is Varèse's Amériques...

http://concert.arte.tv/fr/lensemble-intercontemporain-interprete-boulez-et-varese-la-philharmonie-de-paris#_

[San Antone]

The concert given at Paris's new Philharmonie on February 3, in which the Ensemble Intercontemporain, conducted by Matthias Pintscher and with Marisol Montalvo as soprano soloist, performed Pli selon pli, can be watched on the Arte TV channel's webpage through July 3rd. The second work on the program is Varèse's Amériques...

http://concert.arte.tv/fr/lensemble-intercontemporain-interprete-boulez-et-varese-la-philharmonie-de-paris#_

Thanks for posting this link.  I am watching/listening as I type.

[ritter]

Hope you enjoy(ed) it, sanantonio! This is one of te few major Boulez compositions I've bever seen in concert in its entirety (only the Improvisations sur Mallarmé 1 & 2, conducted by Peter Eötvös last year), and I still regret having missed it when Boulez toured it accross Europe (but, alas, not to Spain) in 2011.

Marisol Montalvo's reaction at the end (during the applause), a sort of mixture of relief, exultancy, sense of accomplishment, and disbelief, is rather touching (and the way one of the--female--violinists of the EIC in the second row watches her, with a face that seems to ask "what is this all about?", is quite funny  ). In any case, singing the whole piece without a score is quite a tour de force, I'd say, and her impassioned delivery of the vocal part seems to me a novel but very valid approach to this stunning music. Brava!

[San Antone]

Hope you enjoy(ed) it, sanantonio! This is one of te few major Boulez compositions I've bever seen in concert in its entirety (only the Improvisations sur Mallarmé 1 & 2, conducted by Peter Eötvös last year), and I still regret having missed it when Boulez toured it accross Europe (but, alas, not to Spain) in 2011.

Marisol Montalvo's reaction at the end (during the applause), a sort of mixture of relief, exultancy, sense of accomplishment, and disbelief, is rather touching (and the way one of the--female--violinists of the EIC in the second row watches her, with a face that seems to ask "what is this all about?", is quite funny  ). In any case, singing the whole piece without a score is quite a tour de force, I'd say, and her impassioned delivery of the vocal part seems to me a novel but very valid approach to this stunning music. Brava!

I was enjoying it quite a bit until for some reason my internet connection froze up and it stopped about half way through.  I will try to get it going again.

[MishaK]

Anyone in Chicago can come hear the Aimard/Stefanovich Boulez program at 3pm on Sunday March 15 at Symphony Center. I'm going.

http://cso.org/TicketsAndEvents/EventDetails.aspx?eid=6672

And members of the CSO will be performing Derive 2 on the 23rd:

http://cso.org/TicketsAndEvents/EventDetails.aspx?eid=6525

[(poco) Sforzando]

Anyone in Chicago can come hear the Aimard/Stefanovich Boulez program at 3pm on Sunday March 15 at Symphony Center. I'm going.

Same program at Carnegie Hall next day at 7:30 pm.

[(poco) Sforzando]

Hope you enjoy(ed) it, sanantonio! This is one of te few major Boulez compositions I've bever seen in concert in its entirety (only the Improvisations sur Mallarmé 1 & 2, conducted by Peter Eötvös last year), and I still regret having missed it when Boulez toured it accross Europe (but, alas, not to Spain) in 2011.

Nor to America. Considering that to some ardent Boulezophiles this is his magnum opus, a real shame. I remember hearing it was performed complete once in New York many decades ago, I think under Arthur Winograd, but I've never seen it scheduled, and I've heard Marteau, Repons, Sur Incises, both Derives, all the piano music and more live here. But I've glad to have had the link (from another source); it was a stunning performance in excellent HD quality, and I was able to download it and make a DVD for myself.

[(poco) Sforzando]

On Thursday, March 26th (the birthday), there will be a brief recital in NY at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by pianist Conor Hanick including some of Boulez's works. Times: 1pm and 3pm, free with museum admission.

[Joaquimhock]

For people interested in Boulez's early works, some VERY RARE pieces like 3 psalmodies for piano and a "mystery" sonata movement  have been broadcasted on France Musique radio for the first time since decades...

The program can be podcasted and is called: Le Mitan des musiciens

http://www.francemusique.fr/emission/le-mitan-des-musiciens/2014-2015/pierre-boulez-maurice-jarre-faces-b-03-16-2015-13-00

[ritter]

For people interested in Boulez's early works, some VERY RARE pieces like 3 psalmodies for piano and a "mystery" sonata movement  have been broadcasted on France Musique radio for the first time since decades...

The program can be podcasted and is called: Le Mitan des musiciens

http://www.francemusique.fr/emission/le-mitan-des-musiciens/2014-2015/pierre-boulez-maurice-jarre-faces-b-03-16-2015-13-00

Thanks for this, Joaquimhock ! Finally the withdrawn Psalmodies are available...I must confess I hade never even heard of that sonata movement...and I see that, in the same program, we also have the chance to listen to Boulez as a virtuoso of the Ondes Martinot...

[Joaquimhock]

In today's program (dedicated to Boulez's early works all the week long) Renaud Machart explained that this "mouvement de sonate" was an intermediary version of sonata N°1

He also broadcasted the very rare Oubli signal lapidé for choir.

[MishaK]

Agree with Tommasini. Matches my experience at their Chicago performance last Sunday.

[ritter]

A glowing tribute by George Benjamin in The Guardian:

I once asked a group of young composers I was teaching whether there was any modern music they didn't like. More than half of them mentioned Pierre Boulez. I was initially shocked that they could reject such a supreme musical creator of our time, but the fiercely polemical character of the man may have been the reason for their antipathy. After all, it was Boulez who once declared, without a trace of irony, that any composer who did not acknowledge the necessity of Schoenberg's 12-tone system was "useless", and who wrote caustic articles such as "Schoenberg Is Dead", criticising the Austrian composer's approach just months after his death in 1951.

Many young composers read his writings, but they don't always know his music. And yet what you might not guess from the polemics is the sheer beauty of his compositions.

Messiaen, who taught Boulez, would say of him that, underneath it all, he was simply a poet. Messiaen also believed it would take a long time for the wider public to really understand Boulez's music, because it has a very particular and original sensibility.

I knew of Boulez well before I studied with Messiaen in the late 1970s. Growing up in the UK, I watched his superb documentaries on BBC2, directed by Barrie Gavin. Boulez was the BBC Symphony Orchestra's chief conductor in the early 70s and together they presented a sequence of inspiring programmes about modern music. Works by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Ives, Bartók, Stravinsky, Varèse, Messiaen and Boulez himself were performed, analysed and contextualised. It was the kind of programming that is so sadly missing today, and it had a huge impact on me as a teenager. I also remember hearing him conduct Berg's Violin Concerto and the Rite of Spring with the National Youth Orchestra at the Festival Hall, London, and at the Proms where he placed a new Ligeti work alongside his own music.

Messiaen would talk with pride of his former student, describing him as a formidable and immense talent, though when young "he was like a flayed lion". Boulez was indeed a very angry young man.

He attacked anything in sight, including those who had taught him, such as René Leibowitz, a Schoenberg disciple who was largely responsible for introducing serialism to Paris. At one point, Boulez even turned against Messiaen, who had done so much to encourage and help him, and it was five years before their relationship was restored.

Boulez grew up in Nazi-occupied France. He was 20 when the second world war ended. The continent had to make itself anew. Messiaen used to describe travelling home on the Metro with Boulez after classes. Boulez would say "Who's going to put music right? It's in such a terrible state."

And Messiaen would reply: "You." He considered himself from his earliest days to have an almost Napoleonic mission regarding music and its cultural role. His ambition was not only to compose, but to change the attitude of the public, institutions in France and – later – the wider western world with regard to modernism. He initially pursued this aim with a heightened form of ideological dogmatism. The works of the Second Viennese School, and composers such as Bartók and Varèse, were not played at all in Paris in the late 40s; that they are now part of the international concert repertoire is in large part due to Boulez.

As a conductor, his approach to the early modernist masterpieces has had a tremendous impact on the way they are considered by younger conductors and heard by audiences. He made stupendous recordings of hundreds of pieces of music – among them works by his illustrious contemporaries Carter, Ligeti, Kurtág, Stockhausen, Berio and Birtwistle – and has inspired and helped generations of younger composers.

Through the power of his personality, the scale of his reputation and his considerable personal charm, Boulez has made big things happen, way beyond the confines of manuscript paper. Paris's new concert hall, the Philharmonie de Paris, owes its existence to him, as does the rest of the Cité de la Musique, his own group the Ensemble Intercontemporain and IRCAM, the musical research institution attached to the Pompidou Centre.

In his own music, however, he moved away from serialism, the great rallying cry of his youth, and over the years has further distanced himself from the concept, now viewing it with scepticism. For me, his best compositions are not the ones from his early years but the works in which the foundations of his earlier idiom are treated much more freely and with greater fantasy. I believe that only when he accepted he was fundamentally a French composer did he find his true voice.

Le Marteau sans maître (1953-57) was a breakthrough. It is a work in which you can also hear the profound influence of extra-European music, above all from Asia and Africa. This radically alters the sonority and the music's sense of time and direction, as well as its expressive viewpoint and ethos. Boulez was by no means the first French composer to be open to, and ravished by, eastern music – it had already had a transformative effect on the father of modern music, Debussy, and on succeeding generations – but he took it a stage further, and the curious marriage between his already transforming serial universe and the extra‑European world produced a unique style.

For me, his quasi-symphonic portrait of Mallarmé, Pli selon pli – completed in the early 60s – is a greater masterpiece, and the decades that followed produced gem after gem: Eclat/Multiples, Cummings Ist der Dichter, ... explosante-fixe ... , Sur Incises ... There is no better postwar piece written for orchestra than Notations, his five hyper-elaborate orchestral canvases, all based on very simple serial pieces he wrote for the piano in his early 20s. Arguably the most important composer-conductor since Mahler, Boulez knows the orchestra more intimately than any of his colleagues, and these short, dazzling showpieces have an intoxicating exuberance and elegance.

Boulez has only published around 30 works in his lifetime, the last about a decade ago. The first time we spent an evening together, in the mid-1980s, I asked him if he had any advice for me. He said: "No, except for one thing: write, just make sure you write lots of music."

Now aged 90, looking back, he perhaps feels he would have liked to have written more. But I suspect he has not had the easiest of relationships with his muse. This is a man with a vastly refined and critical mind. His intelligence is so questioning and extreme, and his aural imagination so sensitive and acute, that composing must have been a taxing experience. The world today doesn't need huge numbers of pieces, as it did in, say, Haydn's time. What are needed, surely, are essential statements, singular and unique works. And these he has provided, without question.

With his conducting and recording, his work with orchestras and institutions in Paris, London, New York and Lucerne, Boulez found a balance that worked for him. He loved conducting, and cherished the contact he has had with the Cleveland and Chicago Symphony Orchestras in the USA, as well as the BBC and London Symphony Orchestras here. His closeness and devotion to the Ensemble Intercontemporain, is such that they resemble family. And then there is his revelatory Wagner interpretation in the centenary Ring at Bayreuth. He has achieved more than most achieve in three lifetimes.

Ultimately I think Boulez is a great optimist, despite the shadows that coloured his early years. In the end what he believes is simple: today's music has to be different from the music of the past.

That's a natural thing. Western music continues to evolve and transform

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/mar/20/george-benjamin-in-praise-of-pierre-boulez-at-90

There's also a a link in The Guardian to archival material from the paper, starting in the early 50s: here

[NJ Joe]

Review: Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich in All-Boulez Program
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
MARCH 17, 2015


Tamara Stefanovich and Pierre-Laurent Aimard on Monday night at Zankel Hall.
Credit Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Pierre Boulez emerged in the late 1940s in Paris as a combative modernist, the brash new leader of the avant-garde. By 1952 he declared that any musician who had not felt the "necessity of the dodecaphonic language" was "of no use." Despite subsequent decades of winning over mainstream classical music audiences through his work as a conductor with lucid, colorful performances of everything from Wagner operas to Mahler symphonies, Mr. Boulez, who turns 90 on March 26, has never shaken his early reputation for writing pieces of off-putting complexity.

I wonder if those who feel this way might have had an epiphany from the Boulez program on Monday night at Zankel Hall. The masterly French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, along with a former student, the brilliant Yugoslav-born pianist Tamara Stefanovich, offered a rare chance for an immersion in some of Mr. Boulez's most fiendishly difficult pieces. Between them they played the complete solo piano works, including the three seminal sonatas, as well as Book II of "Structures" for two pianos. In these dazzling, rhapsodic and nuanced performances, Mr. Boulez's thorny pieces came across as radical, yes; extreme, for sure; but stunningly inventive and supremely musical.

Before playing "Douze Notations," a set of 12 miniatures that Mr. Boulez wrote in 1945 when he was 20, Mr. Aimard, a close associate of the composer, explained that the piano was Mr. Boulez's main instrument for exploration of new compositional challenges. Yet the "Notations" are like character pieces, he said, a quality Mr. Aimard conveyed in his vibrant performance, full of restless energy and myriad shadings. For all the bursts of steely chords and spiraling pointillist flights, echoes of Messiaen, Stravinsky and Schoenberg came through.

In this context, the Piano Sonata No. 1, from 1946, which Mr. Aimard played next, one heard the young Mr. Boulez taking a leap into audacious originality. More jarring than the skittish streams of 12-tone rows and whatnot is the rhythmic radicalism of the sonata. For all the breathless intensity, there is little sense of pulse here. The music unfolds in organic gestures, all fits and starts and stops. Yet Mr. Aimard drew captivating lyricism from the music as well. A gesture would begin with clanking clusters and splintering lines, then trail off into delicate curlicues with crucial lingering notes .

Ms. Stefanovich then played the Sonata No. 2 (completed in 1948), a monumental work in four movements, one of the hardest pieces ever written. Here the young Mr. Boulez was taking on Beethoven, writing a tradition-bashing answer to the challenge of the mighty "Hammerklavier" Sonata. Ms. Stefanovich's performance was staggeringly brilliant, especially the frenzied, explosive climax of the final fast movement.

Mr. Aimard returned for the Sonata No. 3 (completed in 1957), music that alternates between musical assertions and pensive ruminations. Ms. Stefanovich then played "Incises," composed in 1994 for a piano competition, a work she aptly described as a "21st-century neurotic toccata." For once Mr. Boulez gives us a piece with streams of repeated notes and pulsing rhythmic riffs. Mr. Aimard also played "Une Page d'Éphéméride," a short work that Mr. Boulez was asked to write in 2005 as part of an album for young pianists. Being Boulez, though, he clearly had in mind aspiring pianists who already had considerable technique.

Finally, these two Boulez champions performed Book II of "Structures" (completed in 1961), in which the pianists play with significant independence from each other, according to their in-the-moment choices. Even the sequence of events is not predetermined. By reputation this is a piece of formidable complexity, both for performers and listeners. Yet in this arresting, at times impish performance, it sounded delightful.

Can someone recommend available recordings of these works?

Thanks in advance.

[ritter]

I agree with James's recommendations (and it's good to see that Jumppanen's Third sonata gets the credit it's due IMHO).

You may consider, in any case, going for this, NJ Joe:

[asin]B00BLDHPZS[/asin]
It's available in Europe for about half the price AmUS is quoting. You get the Aimard First, the Pollini Second and the Jumpannen Third, plus (almost) all of Boulez's other music in authorative perfromances...