Die conductor and composer Pierre Boulez – Beethoven FM

On Tuesday died at ninety years, the outstanding director, composer and theorist Pierre Boulez.

Boulez was born the March 26, 1925 and joined the Parisian avant-garde music at an early stage of his career. Then claimed and proclaimed that his predecessors had not been radical enough and the music was still waiting accurate serialism with rhythmic advances initiated by Stravinsky and Messiaen combination.

Although this call to develop a renewed modernism was heard and continued in the 1950s, this position became less attractive over time and the same Boulez, while expanding its work on the podium, decreased production volume. Only the availability of new technologies led to a creative recovery in the 80s.

Boulez Director

Boulez began his directing career in the theater company Renaud Barrault in 1946, a period in which it participated actively and almost combative in the Parisian avant-garde music and premiered his first works. With her debut stage music of Honegger, Auric and Poulenc, he toured internationally (he visited Chile in 1952) and recorded the score of Milhaud to Christopher Columbus in 1955.

Its activity as a director kept at the Domaine Musical, concert series founded in 1954, was enthusiastically received by the public and established a pattern that would soon be imitated elsewhere. Its programs, carefully prepared, combined premieres by young authors from several countries and works of the past that were relevant to contemporary music.

After working with the theater company Renaud-Barrault since 1946 and the number of Domaine Musical concerts since 1954, Boulez began his international career in front of the orchestra of the Southwest German Radio in 1957 and made his debut at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam in 1960. He returned to Paris to direct the first production of Wozzeck at the Opera in 1963, participate in the celebrations of the bicentennial of Rameau in 1964.

After the success of Wozzeck at the Paris Opera in 1963, Boulez met Wieland Wagner, grandson of Richard, stage director and co-director of the Bayreuth Festival his brother Wolfgang. In 1966 they collaborated on new productions of Wozzeck in Frankfurt and Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1966, but his death were truncated projects around Don Giovanni, Electra, Lulu, Boris Godunov, Tristan and Isolde and Pelleas and Melisande.

After Wieland’s death, he had to wait a decade to work with directors who will intrigue and persuade. They were Patrice Chereau and Peter Stein. As with the first collaborated in tetralogy of Wagner between 1976 and 1980 in Bayreuth and the premiere of the complete version of Lulu in 1979 in Paris, with the second I was in charge of Pelleas and Melisande in Cardiff and Paris as well as Moses and Aaron Amsterdam and Salzburg.

Meanwhile, Boulez sets a record relationship with Columbia and recorded with the orchestras of Cleveland, New Philharmonia, BBC Symphony and London Symphony repertoire ranging from Berlioz to Webern and Wozzeck with the Opera de Paris and Pelleas and Melisande in Covent Garden, while Deutsche Grammophon published a record 1970 of Parsifal in Bayreuth.

In 1969 he took over as principal guest conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra and also debuted with the New York Philharmonic orchestra, which becomes owner two years later to replace Leonard Bernstein.

During his tenure in New York, between 1971 and 1977, he had enough problems with some members orchestra, by the amount and the requirement of his essays, as well as the typical subscriber season the orchestra, which was conservative and did not care broaden its repertoire. Also not excited the public and critics who saw him as a director too cold and expressionless.

But Boulez not only expanded the repertoire of the orchestra music of the twentieth century, but also traditional lesser known works usually with a thematic programs or a composer. It also organized parallel series of concerts in unusual scenarios that attracted a younger and less conservative to allow interaction between performers, conductors, composers, audit public.

During his tenure, there were guest conductors as Gielen , Tilson Thomas, Barenboim, Levine and Maderna, as well as an important seat for American creators who, at first, thought Boulez would give priority to their European contemporaries and his own music, but recognized and thanked his tremendous contribution when he finished his term as head of the orchestra.

Ensemble Intercontemporain and IRCAM

After concluding his activities as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony and Philharmonic New York in 1977, Boulez began a new and fruitful stage in the creation, teaching and research through the foundation of the IRCAM (Institute de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique / Musique) in the Pompidou Centre in Paris, an entity that brought science, music , research and development of new technologies.

At the same time, Boulez established a specialized set of new repertoires, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, which was the pinnacle of the IRCAM and which soon generated an impressive amount of new works of renowned composers and young people, which he premiered and recorded by the next two decades. However, the direction of the assembly until 1979 and remained at IRCAM until 1992.

After a partial withdrawal of traditional scenarios, Boulez returned with renewed energy in the 1990s, especially after signing a exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon that gave freedom to choose their repertoire, allowed him to re-record some works by Berlioz, Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky, Varese, Messiaen and Webern, release their scores and those of other contemporary and realize a Mahler cycle.

After Georg Solti and Quincy Jones with Alison Krauss, Boulez is the artist who has received more Grammy awards, twenty-seven in total between 1967 and 2005. Are your records The Ring of the Nibelung in Bayreuth, Wozzeck and Lulu at the Opera of Paris, works by Debussy, Ravel, Berlioz, Mahler, Bartok and Varese, some of his scores, and a Grammy to the path.

has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Leeds and Basel, medals of the German, French and English, the prizes Robert Schumann, Johann Sebastian Bach, Karol Szymanowski, Polar, Theodor Adorno, Glenn Gould, Ernst von Siemens, Leonie Sonning, Grawemeyer, Kyoto, Edison and Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, and Frontiers of Knowledge of the BBVA Foundation.

Before his retirement from the stage in 2013, Boulez was still active last decade had acted in Lucerne, Salzburg, Vienna, Berlin, Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan and the Proms, returned to Bayreuth to conduct Parsifal in 2004 and led by Patrice Chereau’s production of the opera From the House of the Dead Janacek in 2007. Nor dropped his work with the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the premiere of new works.

To celebrate ninety years in 2014, the symphony orchestras of Cleveland and Chicago prepared special programs, the Total Immersion cycle Barbican London was held and the festivals of Salzburg, Lucerne, Baden-Baden, Aldeburgh and the Netherlands, or the series of concerts that Barenboim and directed three orchestras devoted to creating Boulez.

composer Boulez

For Boulez, the act of writing was a form of aesthetic research and required it to be conducted under scientific lines. With some of his colleagues, he protested several times in concerts where supposedly modern works were presented but, for them, were superficial and easy. Even Stravinsky’s reputation was sacrosanct.

His own aesthetic research led him to atonality as a necessity and a pupil of Schoenberg, René Leibowitz, began studying serial techniques and create their first works They took as a benchmark the later music of Webern and Schoenberg Quintet Op.26.

Among those initial scores appeared the first publication of Boulez’s Notations for piano written in 1945. Not only these twelve miniatures contained seeds for later work, but also revealed key style as resonant sounds, abrupt gestures, dialectic between agility and intensity, persistence, and explosiveness aspects.

The notations were followed in 1946 by the First Sonata for Piano , a score in two movements whose material is exposed at the beginning and undergoes changes of state and sound quite unpredictable. Strong contrasts

mark the development of this work and the piano ends up sounding like vibraphone, cimbalom or xylophone.

Boulez construction employed a rhythmic cell derived from Messiaen and allowed to vary and develop small rhythmic groups with trade processes and summation, reduced, extension and elimination. Thus, a very small amount of rhythmic ideas could generate enough rhythmic forms to hold an extensive composition.

The musical structure could also rely on a text, as in the trilogy of works based on poems by René Char Le Visage Nuptial initiated and continued with Le Soleil des Eaux and Le Marteau Sans Maitre. Char surrealism influenced the aesthetics of several musicians of the time through its concentrated violence and time management.

Boulez’s reputation grew with the first performances of his second sonata by pianists like Yvette Yvonne Loriod Grimaud and David Tudor in Europe or in America. And his first appearance in Darmstadt in 1952, two years after the premiere, was one of the most anticipated musical events of the postwar period.

After completing the second sonata for piano in 1949, the author wrote Livre pour Quatuor, collection of movements that anticipated the use of randomness and total serialization. While interpreters can choose which way to go, there are sections that take the serial technique to govern the timbre, duration, intensity and height.

This Boulez interest by the total serialism and organize all parameters It was evident in the two electronic surveys, he wrote in 1951, in Polyphonie X, who had a rough debut that year in Donaueschingen, and Structures I that Boulez himself played with Messiaen in Paris in 1952.

In parallel to these scans in total serialism, Boulez wrote a series of articles on art and aesthetics, including the controversial “Schoenberg est mort” of 1952, which continued to protest against what they considered an inappropriate exercise of discoveries music.

Le Marteau

Boulez reached definitive fame as a composer with the premiere of a work that was soon placed on a par with “The Rite of spring “and Pierrot Lunaire. Le Marteau sans maître was titled, was initiated in 1953 and first presented in June 1955 in Baden-Baden.

Le Marteau sans Maître marked the reunion of Boulez with the poetry of Rene Char, in this If three poems published in 1934 that share surreal visions of Breton and Michaux. But unlike his previous scores based on Char, the new work was conceived for a small group voice, alto flute, viola, guitar and percussion.

The three poems by Char are immersed in a structure nine moves, some vowels and other purely instrumental, where the abrupt transitions of tempo, melodic passages with an improvisatory style and fascination with exotic sounds provide flexibility and wealth not always found in serial music.

important effect on the outcome exert a seamless integration of instruments that evoke other cultures, such as percussion Africa and Southeast Asia, and deep agreement of two incompatible aesthetic: the Austro-German constructivist rigidity through Webern and ornamentation . French Debussy and Messiaen mediated

The poems allude to different experiences of modern life through three perspectives: surreal and fantastic, dark and existential, romantic and utopian. They are presented in a nonlinear fashion or narrative and generate the musical structure that combines formal elements “open” or not predictable with other predetermined and very strict.

While the musical material emerges from the brief passages sung for comment developed and expanded by the instruments, the integration of instrumental and vocal lines reaches moments of perfect fusion between musical notes and words as well as the fluidity and subtlety of musical discourse never lost.

Darmstadt

After the success of Le Marteau in 1955, Boulez was invited to give lectures and classes in different parts of Europe and the United States. In addition to courses in Darmstadt, between 1954 and 1965, he taught composition at the Academy of Basel, from 1960 to 1963 and held a series of lectures at Harvard in 1963.

His activity in Darmstadt shaped ” Penser la musique aujourd’hui “publication that systematically exposed their serial developments in art from his interest in the total serialism and, in particular, was related to works written between 1957 and 1962: the third sonata for piano , Poésie pour pouvoir, Structures and Pli Selon Pli II.

It was then that the expansion of the serial technique led Boulez to experiment with the open form and an example was offered freedom pianist in Third Sonata. He chooses the order of movements within certain limits and within them have the option of following alternative routes, selecting which passages interpret or ignore.

The combination of open forms, with a different distribution instruments in the acoustic space, resulted Domaines, written between 1961 and 1968 score in two formats, one for solo clarinet and clarinet over twenty other instruments, allowing both performers determine the final shape of the work.

Through the serial expansion technique, Boulez stepped into the open forms and, in the process, several scores conceived independently became part of a larger entity, a “work in progress “and while this entity assumed a proprietary format, these” components “were taken up and rewritten one or more times.

In this way, the two Improvisations on Mallarmé 1957 became part of the cycle Pli selon pli, a score that continued suffering for three decades changes, while an early version of Don, also integrated into Pli Selon Pli, led to Eclat and Doubles was expanded to Figures-Doubles-Prismes, both works “unfinished”.

Doubles was conceived in 1957 by order of the Lamoureux Orchestra, released the following year by Boulez in Paris, which became Figures-Doubles-Prismes in 1964 and re-released as such in 1964 in Basel, while a third version was heard for the first time in 1968 in The Hague.

Proliferation

The proliferation also led to a work, or part of it , generate another score, as was the case of an array of instrumental essays entitled “explosante-fixe” Boulez published in 1971 and whose starting point was the note E flat (it is in German) in reference to Stravinsky’s way tribute posthumously.

While “explosante-fixe” acquired life as score in 1991, its parent with a basic melodic material containing a formula based on the note E flat and six variants of this formula gave rise Three important works. Rituel in 1974, 1985 and Anthemes Memoriale in 1991

The same technique marked proliferation textures and formats of other works such as those based on a series of harmonies derived from the translation Surname musical Paul Sacher and were Messagesquisse, Répons and Dérive or Incises series. A model for the piano 2005 closed its production: Une page d’ePhemeride

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