Latest news with #PierreBoulez
The Guardian
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Cassie Kinoshi x Ensemble intercontemporain review – vivid and anarchic, new music programme full of thrills
Perhaps it was anniversary fatigue, or perhaps it was half-term. Either way, the latest instalment of the Barbican's celebrations for the centenary of 20th-century musical giant Pierre Boulez featuring Ensemble intercontemporain (his own crack team for new music) drew only a paltry audience. The man himself was dismissive of such difficulties: 'You always find 200 fanatics,' he once observed. 'What is important is to increase the number.' (Composer, conductor, visionary – but Boulez was no PR maven.) The fanatics, at least, were there – though they hadn't come for Boulez himself, if the polite response to a thrillingly anarchic performance of his Sur Incises after the interval was anything to go by. Under rising-star conductor Nicolò Umberto Foron, its moments of freefall reverberation were a delicious release from the ultra-precise rhythmic flurries of three pianos, thunderous in their lower register. Instead, it was the first half that generated excitement: a taut, intensely focused performance of shouting forever into the receiver, for which British composer Hannah Kendall won an Ivor Novello award in 2023, followed by the world premiere of composer, saxophonist and bandleader Cassie Kinoshi's [Untitled]. Kendall's piece is a haunting exploration of Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo's concept of the 'Plantation Machine'. Much of the finely textured score functions as pitched white noise around crackly walkie-talkie speech in French and English. At its most memorable moment, the orchestral instruments fall silent, leaving only music boxes cranking out extracts of classical hits and harmonicas producing vivid note-clusters on every exhalation like an ethereal musical life-support machine. Kinoshi's [Untitled] was a noisier, funkier affair, incorporating virtuosic live turntabling by NikNak, whose whirlwind scratches cut deeply across the orchestra's dense textures, as well as video by French artist Julien Creuzet and solo choreography from tyroneisaacstuart. Musically, it was exquisitely paced. Momentum gathered through the hefty bass of lower strings, fiendish trumpet curlicues were picked up by a cello screaming high up the fingerboard and two flutes combined in a moreish, barline-defying groove. At the heady climax, the orchestra was suddenly cut, leaving only a symphony of squelches, echoes and loops from the turntable, spinning out overhead.
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Pierre Boulez: Éclat/Multiples album review – two of his most significant works are played with fabulous precision
Almost all the major works from the second half of Pierre Boulez's composing career developed in the same way: their starting point is a small-scale ensemble or solo piece that served as the kernel for the much expanded and elaborated later score. That was the process that led to the final versions of works such as Mémoriale, Anthèmes and …explosante-fixe…, and to the pair of substantial pieces that are played with fabulous precision and incisiveness on this disc. Éclat/Multiples, completed in 1981, began life in 1965 as Éclat, a kit-like eight-minute exploration of the sound world Boulez had first created for the central movements of his masterpiece Pli selon Pli, and which he then expanded to a work for 25 instruments. For Sur Incises, which grew by stages through the mid 1990s, the starting point was a solo-piano piece, Incises, while the final work uses trios of pianos, harps and percussionists to create a seductive world of mysterious trills and decaying resonances and sudden outbursts of frantic activity. It's clear from the sketches for Éclat/Multiples that Boulez intended to extend it beyond the 28-minute version that is played today, and this disc includes an extra four minutes of music never recorded before; there may be yet more to come in the future, but in the meantime these are fine accounts of two of Boulez's most significant works. One track available on Bandcamp
New York Times
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Pierre Boulez Was a Titan of 20th-Century Music. What About Now?
Few musicians could be the focus of an architectural tour. Pierre Boulez is one of them. In the Fourth Arrondissement of Paris, next to the Centre Pompidou, you'll find IRCAM, the sound research center that Boulez founded in the 1970s. Not far away, on Place de la Bastille, is an opera house where he suffered one of the few failures of his long career. And on the outskirts of the city, at Parc de la Villette, his Cité de la Musique complex produces concerts, exhibitions and classes, a factory of culture where industrial slaughterhouses once sprawled. The most recent addition to the Cité de la Musique is the Philharmonie de Paris, a concert hall whose main auditorium is named after Boulez. It was completed in 2015, a year before his death, at 90, but he never got to see it. Still, it stands today as a kind of monument to this titan of the past century's music, a composer, conductor, theorist and a canny political force. Michael Haefliger, a friend and colleague from the Lucerne Festival, called Boulez 'the Einstein of music.' The conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen, an inheritor of Boulez's ethos, described him as 'one of the most influential people in music, period.' What exactly, though, is Boulez's influence? A hundred years after his birth, and nearly a decade since his death, his legacy isn't necessarily as a composer. Celebrating his centennial at the Philharmonie in March, two performances of his 'Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna' were notable mostly for their rarity. His music, like that of his peers from the post-World War II generation of high modernists, like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono, is brilliant but out of fashion, and difficult to program. To get a sense of Boulez's true legacy, look at how 'Rituel' was presented. With an accompanying dance by Benjamin Millepied, the evening embraced experimentation, a hallmark of Boulez, a musician who tried to dissolve the boundaries between performers and audience members in the 1970s. That is just one way in which, with lasting influence, Boulez changed how we think about music itself: how it is created, performed and heard, as well as where these things happen, from subterranean laboratories to IRCAM to the modular auditorium, a dream of his that has become the standard for new concert halls today. 'His vision,' said Frank Madlener, the director of IRCAM, 'is all over.' BOULEZ WAS A late bloomer. Born in Montbrison, France, a small town to the west of Lyon, he was passionate about music but bound for a career in engineering. Against his father's wishes, he spent his teens working to get into a conservatory. Not long before his 19th birthday, he was admitted to the famous Conservatoire de Paris. There, his teachers included Olivier Messiaen (who, for comparison, entered the same conservatory at 11). Boulez quickly differentiated himself from Messiaen's convention-defying but tonally colorful vein of modernism; within a year, he was more under the spell of Schoenberg's dodecaphonic system of writing, which influenced his first proper work, the piano solo 'Douze Notations.' Boulez, who seemed to hold only severe opinions, would later disavow and then again accept 'Douze Notations.' In one interview, he argued that early works mean little in the scope of a composer's career, saying, 'It's not because you listen to 'Rienzi' that you are really going to comprehend 'Tannhäuser.'' He became a conductor out of practicality. After learning to play the ondes Martenot, a pioneering electronic instrument, from its creator, he made a modest living with gigs at places like the Folies Bergère. In 1946, he picked up a music job in a production of 'Hamlet' by the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault, where he spent the next nine years as the music director of a small ensemble. It was through that troupe's founders that he started a concert series called the Domaine Musical, a place for the music he was hearing and creating with Stockhausen and others in his concurrent work at the Darmstadt summer course in Germany. But Boulez was also interested in conducting earlier 20th-century music, as well as some established classics, particularly operas, which he took up to nearly instant acclaim. For Boulez's centennial year, Deutsche Grammophon has released two boxed sets: a reissue of his complete works, and a nearly 90-disc collection of his albums for the label and Decca. Throughout the recordings, his defining trait as a conductor is clarity. He had a remarkable ability to render scores by Webern and Schoenberg legible, and few accounts of Stravinsky's 'The Rite of Spring' can match his balance of control and ferocity. When he found a kindred spirit in a soloist, like the soprano Teresa Stratas in Berg's 'Lulu,' the results were nothing less than extraordinary. In 1971, Boulez succeeded Leonard Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic, where he programmed as much Stravinsky as Beethoven. His Rug Concerts, in which the seats of Avery Fisher Hall were removed and the orchestra situated in the center of the auditorium, became cult favorites. The series was a way to appeal to new audiences through a Woodstock-esque vibe of relaxation, with the spirit of a special event, something orchestras still strive for today. Earlier this year, the Philharmonic revived a Rug Concert, unfortunately in a traditional setup. Even so, it was just as appealing for its musical choices as it would have been for Boulez's arrangement. A Brandenburg concerto followed by Schubert's Second Symphony, Webern's Symphony, selections from Boulez's 'Pli Selon Pli' and Stravinsky's suite from 'L'Histoire du Soldat': There hasn't been a more interesting or satisfying program at the Philharmonic this season. During Boulez's years at the Philharmonic, he was lured back to France by the president, Georges Pompidou, who asked him to develop the research institute that would become IRCAM. It was the start of Boulez's era as a builder, navigating politics through changing administrations and tides of public opinion, while also transcending it. While IRCAM was under construction, he founded Ensemble Intercontemporain, a group devoted to new music. The next decade, he was brought in as a leader in building the Opéra Bastille, which became a wellspring of disaster. Its original plans included what Boulez called a 'salle modulable,' a hall that could be reconfigured for different purposes, but as the budget and construction timeline ballooned, the space was scrapped. That idea was finally realized when Cité de la Musique opened in the mid-1990s; now, it is more or less the default. During these decades of construction, Boulez held a chair at the Collège de France, where he delivered a series of lectures that, collected in one volume, look and often read like a lead brick. They are just a portion of his immense output as a writer, the largest since Berlioz's in the 19th century. He was often provocative and absolute, only to change his mind and contradict himself with equal conviction. Laurent Bayle, who succeeded Boulez at IRCAM and Cité de la Musique, and recently published the book 'Pierre Boulez, Aujourd'hui' ('Pierre Boulez Today'), said, 'There is no ideologue in music like him.' Because Boulez was so powerful, his severity could be poison for any artist who didn't adhere to his worldview. He disdained vast swaths of repertoire, to the point where he could seem stubbornly incurious, as in his lack of interest in works by Philip Glass and John Adams. Salonen recalled watching Boulez virtually end the career of a composer after hearing his work, but he also said he was attracted, like many of his modernist peers, to the 'concept of right and wrong' that Boulez offered. 'It was an ethics of contemporary music,' Salonen said. 'Young people want to know the right thing to do, and Boulez was like a moral beacon. He could make you feel like you belonged, like you were one of the good guys.' Perhaps surprisingly, Boulez is often remembered as a warm, wickedly funny presence. Despite his stature, he wasn't a haughty maestro. The French critic Christian Merlin, in his excellent but untranslated biography 'Pierre Boulez,' describes tours in which he rode in coach with musicians rather than business class, and stayed in the same hotels. And there was a generosity in his last act, as the founder and leader of the academy at the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, at Haefliger's invitation. Not long after taking over the festival, Haefliger called Boulez, who 'knew exactly what he wanted to do,' he recalled. 'And I appreciate that this was it, rather than creating polished symphonies or looking for immediate success.' BOULEZ WROTE RELATIVELY LITTLE music. In Deutsche Grammophon's set, his catalog takes up only 11 discs. Salonen said that 'we're too close still' to know what among his works will remain in the repertoire, but some are candidates for classics. And the masterpieces came early. Merlin wrote that with the monumentality of the Second Piano Sonata, 'the young Boulez didn't hesitate to assume the legacy of Beethoven: At 22 years old, he wrote his 'Hammerklavier.'' 'Le Marteau Sans Maître' (1955), a chamber setting of René Char poems for alto and six instrumentalists, appropriately remains an event whenever performed, proof that avant-garde music of its era can be as beautiful as it is intellectual. From there, the list goes on: 'Pli Selon Pli,' 'Répons,' the 'Rituel' recently presented in Paris. Why is Boulez's music so rarely performed? His generation's modernism, sometimes combative in its sound, has at best a cult audience today. Among his peers, though, Boulez stands a comparatively better chance of being programmed. His works may be challenging and idiosyncratic, but they are mostly written for traditional instruments. As Madlener said, 'He was pragmatic, not utopian like Stockhausen.' But Salonen said that Boulez's music asks too much of traditional orchestras: They are written for oddly sized ensembles, which can trigger union complications that likely won't be made up for in ticket sales. 'It's not the kiss of death,' he said of programming a Boulez work, 'but it doesn't help.' Yet the Rug Concert revival in New York earlier this year played to a full house, and the two 'Rituel' performances in Paris sold out. That may have less to do with the music, though, than with making them 'events.' Boulez, a believer in music as event, probably would have approved. An orchestral concert made into a singular moment was among the many signs of Boulez's legacy in Paris during the week of his centennial, even when his music wasn't being performed. IRCAM and Ensemble Intercontemporain continue to thrive, with the spirit of their founder intact even if, as Madlener said, 'there is no aesthetic connection to him at all' in the new works they produce. (Boulez had no interest in composers emulating his sound.) Millepied, too, created a distinct aesthetic inspired by but not analogous to the sound of 'Rituel,' an antiphonal work in which eight small groups of musicians are spread throughout the auditorium. (The dance, along with the rest of the Philharmonie program, comes to the New York Philharmonic this fall.) 'I had this puzzle idea, where you see bits of material alone, and when they come together, your brain receives that it has seen all these pieces already,' Millepied said. 'But while I started with a mathematical, nerd approach in how I wanted to make it, I ended up somewhere emotional.' Boulez's score was a starting point. But it evolved into something else, given to the public in an auditorium named after him, on the campus of a music center that he created, in the city where the monuments to his artistry live and breathe rather than gather dust. Not bad, as legacies go.
The Guardian
05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The week in classical: BBCSO Total Immersion: Pierre Boulez; RLPO/ Hindoyan: Mahler Symphony No 3; Joyce DiDonato and Maxim Emelyanychev
At a talk about Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) at the Barbican last Sunday, one of the speakers dared suggest that the BBC is no longer the cultural beacon it was in the French composer-conductor's lifetime. The exhalation of oufs and pffs from the audience – reminiscent of one of those short, avant-garde pieces consisting only of outbursts of breath that Boulez himself might have written – was indicative: part you're stating the obvious, part how can you say the unsayable in a discussion being broadcast on BBC Radio 3. After some hasty throat clearing, the matter was clarified: other platforms now exist, from YouTube to Spotify to TikTok to all the rest. We are our own curators. The very next day, tacitly acknowledging its changed status, the BBC admitted it faced an unprecedented financial challenge, with an annual income drop of £1bn compared with 15 years ago. Its chair, Samir Shah, said (among other things) that the BBC still had a vital role as 'the place where people come together for unforgettable shared moments'. Later this month, the new season of Proms, the biggest coming together for classical music, will be announced. The BBC orchestras and BBC Singers, endangered for as long as anyone can remember, will play a central part. However sceptical we may be about aspects of Radio 3, or its new sibling, Classical Unwind – designed to awaken the senses and simultaneously relax you into sleep – their very presence is still remarkable. This thought pressed constantly, and urgently, at Total Immersion: Pierre Boulez, an all-day BBC Symphony Orchestra tribute to the brilliant and paradoxical maverick who, in his time as the ensemble's chief conductor (1971-74), shook up concert life – including the Proms, with his Roundhouse series. Always radical, he celebrated intellectual rigour and scorned anything out of line with his thinking: famously, at one time, opera houses he wanted to burn down and Tchaikovsky, whose music he claimed to hate. As a conductor, his quest was for transparency and precision, and an avoidance of any emotion that did not grow directly from the music. His own works, glittering and complex yet more sensuous than he himself might have realised, came only after long struggles and endless revisions. The BBC SO day, which included the pianist Tamara Stefanovich's crystalline accounts of 12 Notations (1945) and Incises (1994, revised 2001), culminated in Pli selon pli, a 70-minute epic that, with Le Marteau sans maître, is Boulez's acknowledged masterpiece. Here it was conducted by Martyn Brabbins and performed with consummate skill by all. The title translates as Fold Upon Fold, from a poem by Boulez's favourite poet, Mallarmé, in which mist recedes to reveal the city of Bruges. Boulez revised it six times between 1957 and 2003. It requires us to rethink what an orchestra is, making it expensive to perform: instead of the usual forces, each instrument is, in effect, hand-picked. A soprano soloist – here the pure-toned Anna Dennis – sings brief texts, scaling an ensemble that jangles and shimmers with multiple harps, guitar, mandolin, celesta, tubular bells and 30 types of percussion. 'That was fantastic, but when will it ever happen again?' someone asked me, noticing my programme as I got off the tube. I have no idea. It felt like stepping back in history, to a period of stern but invigorating musical cubism that liberated younger generations, among them the British composers Harrison Birtwistle and George Benjamin. Who will now take the Boulez legacy forward is an unanswered question. One of his passions was Mahler, especially the later symphonies. Through concerts and recordings he was a pioneer in sparking the modern reappraisal. Boulez's particular interest was in Mahler's expansion of symphonic form – a bit of an understatement as a phrase, since none of the nine (complete) is short, and the Third is reckoned the longest in standard repertory, lasting up to 110 minutes. Given that it self-confessedly embraces all the world, it could be deemed a bit brief. No watch-checking was required in the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra's heartfelt performance in the Philharmonic Hall, under the baton of their charismatic chief conductor, Domingo Hindoyan. The occasion, with the sopranos and altos of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir and the Liverpool Philharmonic Youth Choir, had heightened emotion, since it marked the retirement, after 16 years as chief executive, of one of the most admired orchestral administrators around, Michael Eakin. Tempos tended towards the broad, but atmosphere and detail shone out, ebbing and flowing through the six movements, from rustic dance to Nietzschean nocturne. The soloist Jennifer Johnston, herself a Liverpudlian, is the mezzo-soprano of choice for the glowing intensity of O Mensch. The big trombone solo, menacing, low and insistent in the huge opening movement, was impeccably played. So too was the offstage post horn, calling as if from a distant Austro-Bohemian peak. From massed orchestra and chorus to one singer and one pianist is less of leap than might appear: Schubert, admired (mostly) by his fellow Austrian Mahler, also explored long form, in his late piano sonatas, and especially in the song cycle Winterreise. Joyce DiDonato recorded it with the conductor-pianist Yannick Nézet-Séguin in 2021. At Wigmore Hall she sang it – twice in one evening – with another regular collaborator, conductor and keyboard virtuoso Maxim Emelyanychev, here playing a fortepiano. This earlier instrument transfigured the piano part, now more clipped, alert, imperative. DiDonato has, lightly and unobtrusively, with use of a small desk and book, suggested a historical setting for these 24 songs of loss and love, written for male voice. The shifts in feeling, as well as the deepening and whitening of vocal colour, could have a column to themselves. As only she could – whoever utters anything after Winterreise? – the 'Yankee Diva' spoke a few words and gave us an encore: Richard Strauss's Morgen! Nothing to add to that. Star ratings (out of five) Pierre Boulez ★★★★ Mahler Symphony No 3 ★★★★★ Joyce DiDonato and Maxim Emelyanychev ★★★★
The Guardian
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Total Immersion: Pierre Boulez review
It's hard in our current climate to imagine any other iconoclast of musical modernism being celebrated as energetically as Pierre Boulez is to mark his centenary year. But even amid fear and funding cuts, it remains impossible to imagine postwar classical music without him. There is, in theory, a Boulez for everyone: revelatory conductor, director of a major French research institute, rhetorical troublemaker – 'blow up the opera houses,' he famously suggested – and, of course, composer of intricate, horizon-shifting scores. Boulez's own music was centre-stage for the BBC Symphony Orchestra's latest total immersion day, the audience modest but passionate. ('To start, find 200 fanatics,' he once urged on the question of engaging people with new music.) The closing concert crackled abruptly into life, the first of his Deux Études – Musique Concrète for Tape griping and whirring from overhead speakers with the stage still empty. In the second, semi-recognisable pitches rush past in flurries, all attack and ending. More than 70 years since Boulez created them, such sounds remain refreshingly alien. Pianist Tamara Stefanovich's back-to-back performances of 12 Notations and Incises should be required listening for anyone still concerned about the 'mathematical' qualities of Boulez's music. Yes, she captured minute details, her tone utterly lucid. Her hands executed their own mesmerising ballet, while her pedalling was impossibly subtle. But it was the performance's overwhelming musicality that made it unforgettable: Stefanovich's absolute sense of line and direction, with melodic riffs clicking into a groove and complex textures gifted perspective. The rest of the programme struggled to reach that high bar. Under Martyn Brabbins, BBC Singers were fearless (and armed with tuning forks) in Cummings ist der Dichter, but the orchestral texture lacked shape and drive. Pli Selon Pli – Boulez's largest work – suffered similar problems. Soprano Anna Dennis provided a much-needed focal point and real communicative urgency, her upper register slicing laser-like through its instrumental surrounds. But too many of the orchestral passages felt like a battle with the barline: the challenges of simply keeping up, keeping together and getting the notes right left too little space for enchantment, never mind the momentum and musicality of the bigger picture.
