Latest news with #PierreBoulez
The Guardian
24-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ensemble Intercontemporain/Bleuse review – from a clown to a clarinet and Cathy Berberian
Twin titans of the 20th-century avant garde, Luciano Berio and Pierre Boulez were born seven months apart in 1925. This well-crafted concert by Ensemble Intercontemporain, the orchestra Boulez founded in 1976, avoided the obvious hits while demonstrating just how different their music could be. Berio's Sequenza V for solo trombone is one of 14 pieces he wrote to test the boundaries of particular instruments or vocal types. It was inspired by Grock, a Swiss-born clown and one-time neighbour of the composer, whose personality had fascinated him as a boy. Lucas Ounissi, ambling on in full circus slap and a lime-green wig, put his instrument through its paces. Juggling a handheld plunger mute, he rasped and farted away, frequently singing and playing at the same time. A virtuoso performance showed off the breadth of the composer's imagination as well as his singular sense of humour. The more sober-minded Boulez was represented by his Dialogue de l'ombre double (Dialogue of the Double Shadow). Written to celebrate Berio's 60th birthday, it pits an on-stage clarinettist against his pre-recorded doppelganger, the latter electronically manipulated in real time and piped into the auditorium through speakers. The versatile Jérôme Comte hot-desked from one music stand to another, taking melismatic licks and frenetic outbursts in his stride. Rock-solid technique and calm deliberation brought clarity and purpose to Boulez's intricate demands. The pre-record, meanwhile, bounced off the walls and ceiling of the Royal Albert Hall in a mesmerising wash of surround sound. The grand finale was Berio's Recital I (For Cathy), a piece the composer wrote in 1972 for his former wife Cathy Berberian. The conceit is theatrical: an operatic diva shows up for a recital only to find her accompanist isn't there. An ensemble of 17 takes up the cause, with the singer descending into madness as she tosses off scatter-gun quotes from vocal works of the past. Berberian's visceral account, captured on record, was a tour de force. Sarah Aristidou certainly acted a good fight, with conductor Pierre Bleuse gamely adding his dramatic six penn'orth, but the spoken text was barely audible, rendering the work more gnomic than usual. Listen again on BBC Sounds until 12 October. The Proms continue until 13 September.
Yahoo
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
How Kamasi Washington and 100 musicians filled LACMA's empty new building with a sonic work of art
'The general public was admitted to new Los Angeles County Museum of Art for the first time on Friday night — not to look at art but to listen to music,' wrote Times music critic Albert Goldberg in 1965. Exactly 70 years and three months later, history repeated itself. Thursday night was the first time the public was allowed into LACMA's David Geffen Galleries. The occasion was a massive sonic event led by jazz saxophonist Kamasi Washington. More than a hundred musicians spread out in nine groups along 900-foot serpentine route of Peter Zumthor's new building, still empty of art. The celebration, which drew arts and civic leaders for the first of three preview nights, was far grander than the concert on March 26,1965, that opened LACMA's Leo S. Bing Theatre the night before the doors opened to the museum's original galleries. That occasion, a program by the legendary Monday Evening Concerts in which Pierre Boulez conducted the premiere of his 'Éclat,' helped symbolize an exuberant L.A. coming of age, with the Music Center having opened three months earlier. Read more: Column: The new LACMA is sleek, splotchy, powerful, jarring, monotonous, appealing and absurd Monday Evening Concerts had been a true L.A. event drawing local musical celebrities including Igor Stravinsky and showing off L.A.'s exceptional musicians. The mandolinist in 'Éclat,' for instance, was Sol Babitz, the father of the late, quintessential L.A. writer Eve Babitz. Boulez, an explosive composer, eventually turned the 10-minute ''Éclat,' for 15 instruments' into a 25-minute orchestral masterpiece, 'Éclat/Multiples,' and left unfinished sketches behind to extend that to a full hour. Washington turned out to be the ideal radical expansionist to follow in Boulez's footsteps for the new LACMA, with a resplendent enlargement of his 2018 half-hour EP, 'Harmony of Difference.' The short tracks — 'Desire,' 'Knowledge,' 'Perspective,' "Humility," 'Integrity' and 'Truth' — employ nearly three dozen musicians in bursts of effusive wonder. For LACMA, Washington tripled the number of musicians and the length. What some critics thought were bursts of bluster, however enthralling, became outright splendor. Introducing the program, LACMA Director Michael Govan called it an event that has never happened before and may never happen again. I got little sense of what this building will be like as a museum with art on the walls, but it's a great space for thinking big musically and, in the process, for finding hope in an L.A. this year beset by fires and fear-inducing troops on our streets. Washington is one of our rare musicians who thrives on excess. He has long been encouraged to aim toward concision, especially in his longer numbers, in which his untiring improvisations can become exhausting in their many climaxes. But that misses the point. I've never heard him play anything, short or long, that couldn't have been three times longer. His vision is vast, and he needs space. In the David Geffen Galleries, he got it. The nine ensembles included a large mixed band that he headed, along with ensembles of strings, brass, woodwinds and choruses. Each played unique arrangements of the songs, not quite synchronized, but if you ambled the long walkways, you heard the material in different contexts as though this were sonic surrealism. Acoustically, the Geffen is a weird combination. The large glass windows and angled concrete walls reflect sound in very different ways. Dozens of spaces vary in shape, size and acoustical properties. During a media tour earlier in the day, I found less echo than might be expected, though each space had its own peculiarities. Washington's ensembles were all carefully amplified and sounded surprisingly liquid, which made walking a delight as the sounds of different ensembles came in and out of focus. A chorus' effusiveness gradually morphed into an ecstatic Washington saxophone solo down the way that then became a woodwind choir that had an organ-like quality. The whole building felt alive. There was also the visual element. The concert took place at sunset, the light through the large windows ever changing, the 'Harmony of Difference' becoming the differences of the bubbling tar pits nearby or the street life on Wilshire or LACMA's Pavilion for Japanese Art, which looks lovely from the new galleries. Govan's vision is of a place where art of all kinds from all over comes together, turning the galleries into a promenade of discovery. Musically, this falls more in line with John Cage's 'Musicircus,' in which any number of musical ensembles perform at chance-derived times as a carnival of musical difference — something for which the Geffen Galleries is all but tailor-made. Nevertheless, Washington brilliantly demonstrated the new building's potential for dance, opera, even theater. The museum may not have made performance a priority in recent years, but Washington also reminded us that the premiere of Boulez' 'Éclat' put music in LACMA's DNA. Seven decades on, Zumthor, whether he intended it or not, now challenges LACMA to become LACMAP: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Performance. Get notified when the biggest stories in Hollywood, culture and entertainment go live. Sign up for L.A. Times entertainment alerts. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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.
