“To browse through the album of Marion Kalter is much more than to look at portraits of musicians [...] it is to enter in deep contact with the impenetrable world of music and musicians.” (Pierre Boulez on Marion Kalter, Paris, December 2006)
No other photographer has been as close to Boulez as French photographer Marion Kalter. For several decades she has accompanied him not only in Paris, but also at other focal points of his musical creativity.
Tonight, 20 August, she presents “Pierre Boulez: Images Exposed” at Das Kino in Salzburg.
On 12 August, the Salzburg Festival presented a TerraceTalk with Daniel Barenboim, Helga Rabl-Stadler, Florian Wiegand and Wolfgang Schaufler.
Boulez is often perceived only as a structuralist, says Wolfgang Schaufler, a representative of Universal Edition. “Many don’t see the emotional side of the music, of course, since his music is new,” says Daniel Barenboim. “We cannot see all aspects of it yet.” Boulez himself has often discussed various elements of his music, but has said very little about emotionality, because that seems a matter of course to him. Everyone has different emotions when hearing the same piece. “Boulez has managed to feel with his head and think with his heart,” says Daniel Barenboim.
Read more on the website of the Salzburg Festival.
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- Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera
- Celebrating the 90th birthday of Pierre Boulez
- The Barber of Seville for children
Find out more about Universal Edition at this year’s Salzburg Festival in our current newsletter.
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The Musik 21 Festival “Klang-Körper” kicks off today and will go on until Sunday!
Prominent guests of the festival will be pianists Tamara Stefanovich and Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who will be performing a selection of Pierre Boulez’ piano pieces, including Structures, Deuxième Livre for 2 pianos.
Furthermore, the Kairos Quartett will be performing Georg Friedrich Haas String Quartet No. 3 „In iij. Noct.” – a piece in which darkness is not present merely as an absence of light, but becomes the key theme of the work – on Saturday.
Find out more on Musik 21’s website.
Songbirds softened the severities of Boulez’s Improvisations sur Mallarmé, as if Messiaen, Boulez’s bird-loving teacher, were providing commentary.
Alex Ross has reviewed The Ojai Music Festival for The New Yorker.
Join Jill Richards and Waldo Alexander in their celebrations of the 90th birthday of Pierre Boulez: the “Day of the Giants” – an informal, informative and interactive day of fun and music – takes place on 28 June from 11:00 until 17:00 at the Goethe-Institut in Johannesburg.
On the programme: Boulez’ Anthèmes (with live electronics), Domaines, Deuxième Sonate as well as John Cage’s 4′33″ and four new compositions in response to the works of Pierre Boulez.
Find the full programme on the Facebook event page.
The legend of Pierre Boulez as a towering icon of the avant garde precedes him, but what I want to bring to our retrospective is my overriding impression of his humanity. Pierre is a man who is passionate, loyal and very human – an outstanding leader but also modest and generous. (Pierre-Laurent Aimard)
From today until Friday, the Aldeburgh Music Festival honours Pierre Boulez with a range of performances of the composer’s works, including A Pierre Dream: A Portrait of Pierre Boulez.
Find the full programme on the website of the Aldeburgh Festival.
Earlier this year, Universal Edition interviewed Pierre-Laurent Aimard for our digital magazine MusikSalon. You can watch the interview here or read a transcript on our MusikSalon:
The music is crystalline in its sheer beauty and in the mysterious network of quasi-neural connections that Boulez creates between every sound and moment in the piece. But Répons also has an awesome, torrential energy, in the streams of surreally fast music that careen throughout the ensemble, and in the collective, multi-dimensional sonic spectacular that the collective acoustic and electronic ensemble can create. (Tom Service, The Guardian, 12 June 2015)
A clearly impressed Tom Service has reviewed the Matthias Pintscher’s and the Ensemble Intercontemporain’s recent performance of Répons for The Guardian.
Find out more about Pierre Boulez on our #Boulez90 blog.
Beyond the Score: A Portrait of Pierre Boulez will be performed on 2 June by Asko | Schönberg and the Slagwerk Den Haag at the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ.
The show was conceived by Gerard McBurney as part of Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s acclaimed Beyond the Score series, keypieces from the Boulez’ oeuvre will be performed live together with the showing of rare archival footage and new interviews with the composer and conductor.
Once, only Boulez himself could have achieved such a performance: fortunately he clearly now has successors who are equal to the task. (Gavin Dixon, bachtrack, 24 April 2015)
Péter Eötvös and the London Symphony Orchestra dedicated a concert to Pierre Boulez on 23 April at the Barbican in which they performed Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna and other works.
Read Gavin Dixon’s full review on bachtrack.
If people complain of its atonality and difficulty, they should think of music from other cultures, which can sound equally alien and provide unequivocal evidence for tonal systems being the result of cultural conditioning. In this way, Boulez’s music can be seen as a universal music, rooted in the equally universal language of mathematics. (Emiel de Lange, Felix Online, 5.4.2015)
In a recent article on Felix Online Emiel de Lange explores the music of Pierre Boulez. Read the full article here.
On 23 April, Peter Eötvös conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in a concert dedicated to Boulez, on 28 April a birthday salute by ensemble intercontemporain and Matthias Pintscher takes place. Read more about the concerts by clicking the respective links.
When Boulez turned 90 on March 26, he did so as perhaps the world’s most complete musician, and without doubt one of its very greatest conductors. The old stereotype has been almost perfectly inverted: Boulez is now lionized not only for his mastery of modern and contemporary works, but for the ability to elicit fresh sonic and structural details in works stretching back to the 19th century.
David Weininger on the Deutsche Grammophon’s 44-CD set “Pierre Boulez – 20th Century”. Find the full review on The Boston Globe.
The relationship between Pierre Boulez and Universal Edition, which has been publishing his music since 1953, can only be described as serendipitous. Boulez has endowed the UE catalogue with many of his masterpieces and conquered new terrain with his use of electronics. Boulez is a pioneer whose roots are firmly embedded in tradition, including the one which UE publishes.
As a conductor, his unflagging commitment to the Vienna School has affirmed its place in the repertoire.
His esteemed and exemplary performances of music by Mahler, Bartók, Janáček, Szymanowski, Berio and many other UE composers crowns the good fortune of our collaboration.
Universal Edition congratulates Pierre Boulez on his 90th birthday.
Jonathan from UE has made a Flipboard magazine for Pierre Boulez at 90 – you can flip through it here:
“Ultimately I think Boulez is a great optimist, despite the shadows that coloured his early years. In the end what he believes is simple: today’s music has to be different from the music of the past.
That’s a natural thing. Western music continues to evolve and transform and change. And those that don’t agree, well … they’re wrong!” (George Benjamin, The Guardian, 20.03.2015)
In his article “In praise of Pierre Boulez at 90” composer George Benjamin salutes Pierre Boulez. Find the full article on The Guardian.
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