Boulez reviews

Daniel Barenboim: Hommage à Boulez

That many more music-lovers now know Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) as a groundbreaking composer as well as conductor and one-time polemicist is thanks to his collaborator of 50-some years, Daniel Barenboim: following the latter’s performance of Dérive 2 at 2012’s BBC Proms – conducting members of the likewise trailblazing West-Eastern Divan Orchestra – Boulez reportedly joked that more people heard it that evening than at all previous performances combined.

Michael Barenboim performs violin sonatas by JS Bach, Bartók and Boulez

It may just be a wooden box with four strings, but what a world of sounds the violin can create! This cleverly arranged CD is bookended with Boulez’s Anthèmes I and II, showing the possibilities of the instrument on its own, and with electronics. Apart from the extensive range of technique that Michael Barenboim effortlessly realises, the confidence and maturity of the musical language is stunning, and often harmonically and texturally beautiful.

Boulez conducts The Rite of Spring

Boulez’s Rite packs a mighty punch with superb orchestral playing. Petrushka is equally insightful, with brilliantly translucent textures and incisive rhythms.

Erik Levi

Boulez Mémoriale; Dérives

Pierre Boulez: Live at the Louvre

The Firebird was first produced 100 years ago, so new recordings are hardly a surprise. Nonetheless, a brace of Firebirds on DVD from one conductor, Pierre Boulez, suggests poor planning somewhere.

The first comes from the opening concert of the 2008 Salzburg, and the second from a free concert in the pyramid at the Louvre in December the same year.

Pierre Boulez in Rehearsal

This looks to me as if the cameras began rehearsing for a performance (there are some elaborate crane and travelling shots), and then the producers realised that they could get added value by using the rehearsal footage, and getting Boulez to fill in the background after the event. So the DVD can’t quite make up its mind whether it’s performance, rehearsal or illustrated talk.

Stockhausen, Berio, Boulez, Messiaen, Debussy, Varse, Kagel, Nono, Henze & PousseurStravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern & Berg

After several decades of substantial funding for the arts, especially music, and genuine political leadership on cultural life, it is easy to forget that post-war France was gripped by a kind of cultural torpor. In this context, Pierre Boulez was, for many, a prophetic voice crying in the wilderness, and the concerts of Le Domaine Musical a beacon lighting the way forward. Less emotively, the Domaine Musical was where Boulez honed his remarkable skills as a concert-organizer, and, crucially, it is where he cut his teeth as a conductor.

Poulenc, Messiaen, Sancan, Jolivet, Dutilleux & Boulez

Patrick Gallois gives virtuoso and (grâce à Dieu) vibrato-free renderings of six classics from French flute music of the last 60 years.

Boulez: Pli Selon Pli; Le visage nuptial

Boulez’s rollercoaster rides of nerve-jangling sonic juxtapositions and exotic timbres will either take you to a higher plane of existence or merely infuriate. Either way, these are intoxicating performances. Julian Haylock

Kurt‡g, Schoeller, Boulez

The focus of all six works here is the phenomenal bassoon-playing of Pascal Gallois; each piece was composed with his astonishing technical agility, sense of lyricism and range of sonic effects in mind. In the case of Pierre Boulez’s Dialogue à l’ombre double, the result is specifically refracted through this bassoonist’s virtuosity; it was originally composed for clarinet and electronics in 1985, and at Gallois’s prompting the composer made this arrangement for him a decade later.

Stravinsky, Dallapiccola, Satie (Orch. DŽsormire), Boulez & Bart—k

One of the major unsung heroes of 20th-century musical life must surely be the French conductor ROGER DÉSORMIÈRE. A close confidante of Erik Satie, he first established his reputation working for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in the Twenties, and subsequently maintained a close association with the avant-garde until a cerebral haemorrhage in 1952 tragically forced him to retire at the age of 54.

Boulez: Rituel in memoriam Maderna; Notations I, II, III, IV, VII; Figures-Doubles-Prismes

If ever completed, Notations will consist of 12 orchestral studies, expansions of the set of piano miniatures Boulez composed as a student in 1945. Each that has appeared so far – five over the last quarter of a century – is a miracle of expressive concision and textural sleights of hand. David Robertson, who worked with Boulez at the Ensemble InterContemporain, conducts those five, including what is only the second recording of Notation VII, premiered four years ago.

Boulez: Répons; Dialogue de l'ombre double

After years of focusing its attentions on recording benchmark readings of the standard, mainly Germanic contemporary repertoire, DG proposes to issue ten new-music CDs a year in this new series, 20/21, comprising both freshly recorded material and reissues which will reflect a broad stylistic range.

Boulez: Notations; Structures pour deux pianos - livre II; ... explosante-fixeâ€¦

This disc shows just how far Boulez the composer has travelled over the last fifty years – and how true he’s stayed to his roots. The twelve Notations were written in 1945, when the composer was just twenty. They are wonderfully concentrated miniatures, nearly all less than a minute long, full of an explosive energy held tightly in check and then suddenly released. Pierre-Laurent Aimard admirably projects the ‘frenzy’ (a favourite word of Boulez) in these pieces, but he finds, in between the flying shards of notes, a vein of introspection as well.

Boulez: Pli selon pli; Livre pour cordes

Pli selon pli must be regarded as one of Boulez’s most impressive and absorbing compositions. A vocal cycle based upon poems by Stéphane Mallarmé, it is conceived on the grandest scale and utilises an orchestral ensemble of considerable proportions. Yet apart from the turbulent musical discourse that infuses the final movement, Tombeau, the overriding impression remains one of intimacy, especially in the three Improvisations, where the delicate sonorities of tuned percussion, guitar, mandolin and harp punctuate the predominantly lyrical vocal line.

Bart—k, Berg, Boulez, Cage, Carter, Glass, Ives, Kurt‡g, Schnittke, Varse, Zimmermann, etc

With the dawning of a new century, it was inevitable that retrospectives of the old century, and millennium, would be prevalent. While many such projects are just excuses for recycling existing recordings or concert programmes, there have also been thought-provoking attempts to understand the multifarious artistic developments of the 20th century.

Messiaen, Stockhausen, Evangelisti, Aldo Clementi & Boulez

With his CD journey of discovery through the piano music of John Cage well advanced, Steffen Schleiermacher has turned his attention to the music that defined the avant-garde in Europe at the very time that Cage was turning things upside down across the Atlantic. This is the first disc in a series to be devoted to the piano works that came out of the Darmstadt summer schools in the Fifties, when total serialism and high-octane polemics were the daily diet; the sheer energy and commitment of Schleiermacherperformances certainly augur well for what is to come.

Boulez, Jolivet, Dutilleux, Varèse

It is tempting to think of this marvellous programme as masterpieces of the modern flute repertoire. They are certainly masterpieces, and each has entered the flute repertoire, but they can scarcely be given the epithet ‘modern’ when all were composed by the middle of the last century. Philippe Bernold and Alexandre Tharaud have assembled a recital of flute pieces by the French composers who had the greatest impact on postwar musical thought.

Boulez: sur Incises; Messagesquisse; Anthèmes 2

What links the three works here is the way in which they were conceived: all of them grew out of existing compositions, in an approach that has become a familiar Boulez technique over the last two decades. He takes a small and apparently insignificant miniature as the kernel of something more elaborate and substantial, in a process of expansion that theoretically has no end point.

Boulez: Polyphonie X; Poésie pour pouvoir; Structures II,

Col Legno’s Collage series is rapidly developing into an important documentary archive for music from the second half of the 20th century. Pride of place in the latest batch goes to the Boulez disc, a collection of world premiere performances. The Tombeau à la mémoire du Prince Max Egon zu Fürstenberg was the 1959 draft of what ultimately became the finale of the masterpiece Pli selon pli, while Polyphonie X from 1951 and Poésie pour pouvoir (1958) are two works with almost mythical status in the Boulez canon; both of them were performed once only before being withdrawn.