Pierre Boulez News
French composer, conductor and writer (1925–2016)
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Commemorations 2025 (Birth: Pierre Boulez)
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- conductor, composer, musicologist, music theorist, ondist, university teacher, pianist, musician, writer
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2024-03-28
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2024-03-26 20:20:45
Pierre Boulez, born March 26, 1925, in Montbrison, France, is the most significant French composer o
2024-03-26 04:09:41
This Week in Classical Music: March 25, 2024. Maurizio Pollini, one of the greatest pianists of the last half century, died two days ago, on March 23rd in Milan at the age of 82. His technique was phenomenal, even though he lost some of it in the last years of his life (he performed almost till the very end of his life and probably should’ve stopped earlier). His Chopin was exquisite (no wonder that he won the eponymous competition in 1960), as was the rest of the standard 19th-century piano repertoire, but he also was incomparable as the interpreter of the music of the Second Viennese School, and even more so as the performer of the contemporary music, much of it written by his friends: Luigi Nono, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bruno Maderna, and many other. He will be sorely missed. Speaking of Pierre Boulez: his anniversary is this week as […]
2024-03-23 15:27:00
R.I.P. Maurizio Pollini (1942-2024)
[…] some other such nonsense. I read review after review in which the musical equivalent of the nouveaux riches would lament his technical ability, failing to realise that, like that of any great musician, it was in the service of a musical performance that would have been nothing without it. By now, of course, I knew among other recorded performances that simply astounding DG Originals CD, bringing together two original recordings, of Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Webern, and Boulez. Prokofiev and Stravinsky were no longer in his repertory by the time I heard him, but both the Webern (Variations, op.27) and Boulez (Piano Sonata no.2) I would hear live more than once. One of those occasions combined the two, in a 2006 recital at the Salzburg Festival. It had been advertised, somewhat surprisingly, as an all-Mozart recital, but then it was the composer’s 250th anniversary year. I had longed to hear him in […]
2024-03-18 12:48:00
[…] weight, balance, and clarity. Much the same could be said of the concluding fugue. Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments sounded as seductive and rebarbative as ever, a perfect objet trouvé that find itself somehow chiselled to still further perfection. Apparently ossified lines suggestive of The Rite of Spring were imbued with radically new life, the performance as a whole splendidly alive: a liturgy in itself, to which we were permitted audience if not participation. If Boulez was an ideal interpreter (celebrant?) of this hieratic music, I could not help but think Stockhausen must have loved it too. At any rate, it made for a splendid introit to the Symphony of Psalms, whose similar strangeness registered visually in orchestral layout (famously, no violins and violas, nor clarinets) before a note had been heard. It proved another labyrinth, as full of incident in its way, above all in the first movement, as […]
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