Pierre Boulez News
French composer, conductor and writer (1925–2016)
1
Commemorations 2025 (Birth: Pierre Boulez)
- piano
- classical music
- France
- conductor, composer, musicologist, music theorist, ondist, university teacher, pianist, musician, writer
streaming
Last update
2024-03-14
Refresh
2024-03-08 11:10:00
Pierre Boulez SaalJonathan Harvey: String Quartet no.1 (1977) Cathy Milliken: In Speak for string quartet (2023, world premiere) Toshio Hosokawa: Oreksis for piano quintet (2023, world premiere) Birtwistle: String Quartet: The Tree of Strings (2007)Irvine Arditti, Ashot Sarkissjan (violins)Ralf Ehlers (viola)Lucas Fels (cello) Tomoki Kitamura (piano) On 7 March 1974, the Arditti Quartet gave its first concert at the Royal Academy of Music, music to honour Krzysztof Penderecki on bestowal of an honorary degree. Fifty years later to the day and several changes of personnel later – Irvine Arditti the one constant – the Quartet celebrated at Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal its fiftieth birthday, followed by a reception hosted by the Paul Sacher Stiftung, which also hosts the ensemble’s archive . True to its spirit, here was a mixture of new and newer: two Arditti commissions, Jonathan Harvey’s First String Quartet (the first ever) and Harrison Birtwistle’s The Tree of Strings […]
2024-03-04 15:36:37
Luigi Dallapiccola, Part II, 2024
[…] Michele Mariotti. In 1951, Serge Koussevitzky, the music director of the Boston Symphony and himself a champion of modern music, invited Dallapiccola to give lectures at the Tanglewood Festival. After that first trip, Dallapiccola often traveled to the US, sometimes staying for a long time. Dallapiccola, who spoke English, German and French, also traveled in Europe. Interestingly, he never visited the Darmstadt Summer School, the gathering place for young composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna, who were experimenting with serial music and developing new idioms. It’s especially surprising considering that he was very close to Luigi Nono, and that Luciano Berio, also a Darmstadt habitué, was his former student. It seems that the Darmstadt composers were too cerebral and too radical for Dallapiccola, whose pieces, while strictly serial during that period, were infused with lyricism, somewhat in the manner of one of his idols, […]
2024-01-28 13:04:00
Salzburg Mozartwoche (1) – Mozart and Salieri, 27 January 2024
[…] by baritone Brett Pruunsild, the two achieving considerable chemistry, notwithstanding the necessity of singing offstage. Similarly impressive was Ekaterina Krasko’s sparkling despatch of the Salieri arias, likewise to sympathetic playing from the conservatoire students and lively overall direction by Röhrig. There is charm and not a little magic here in this co-production between the Stiftung Mozarteum, the Mozarteum University, and the Marionette Theatre. And once again, I find myself wishing more composers would, as Pierre Boulez suggested some time ago, avail themselves of the possibilities puppetry might offer opera. There is something unquestionably Mozartian to the idea.
2024-01-26 10:02:00
BPO/Petrenko - Schoenberg, 25 January 2024
[…] Schoenberg’s. An attempt at comparison would be pointless: I cannot remember much other than that, even then, it impressed me greatly. But this is therefore a work with which I have lived for a while, and of which I have heard a number of fine performances since that CBSO Prom with Simon Rattle (and Maurizio Pollini), one next door at the Kammermusiksaal included (from members of this same orchestra as the Scharoun Ensemble and Pierre Boulez). Today’s Berlin Philharmonic and Kirill Petrenko have little to fear from even the most exalted comparisons, but it is better simply to consider their performance on its own terms. In some ways the most conservative – in the proper rather than the debased, contemporary sense – of revolutionaries and surely the most revolutionary of conservatives, Schoenberg stands Janus-faced, that historical position readily conveyed here in immanent, performing terms. For a work so sunny and […]
or
- timeline: Composers (Europe). Conductors (Europe). Performers (Europe).
- Indexes (by alphabetical order): B...