In honour of Pierre Boulez’ 90th birthday next year, the internationally acclaimed pianist Taka Kigawa, “an expert negotiator between freedom and restriction” (La Nacion, 5.3.2014), will perform the composer’s Complete Solo Piano Music next Monday at (le) poisson rouge in New York. Boulez’ 12 Notations, Première Sonate, Deuxième Sonate, Troisième Sonate (including Sigle), Incises and une page d’éphéméride are on the programme.
The New York Times has previewed Kigawa’s Complete Solo Piano Works recital this Monday: “[Kigawa] has long made the solo piano works of Pierre Boulez a specialty in performances that bring out the exhilarating energy and myriad colorings in these fiercely difficult scores.”
Update: read reviews of the evening on The New York Times and the New York Classical Review by clicking on the corresponding links.
Arnold Schönberg’s Pierrot lunaire, conducted by Pierre Boulez with Helga Pilarczyk as Sprechstimme, was the first ever long-playing record to be released on the German label WERGO, which was founded in 1962.
This historic recording – a highlight of the label’s early catalogue – has recently been reissued on CD, together with an 80-page booklet.
Find out more on the website of WERGO.
The internationally acclaimed pianist Taka Kigawa, who has recently been described as “an expert negotiator between freedom and restriction” (La Nacion, 5.3.2014), will perform Pierre Boulez’ Douze Notations on 18 June at the Greencastle Summer Music Festival.
On the morning the day after, he’ll do a Q&A with the audience at Classical 90.5 WUOL Louisville and give a free concert, performing Boulez’ 12 Notations, Première Sonate, Deuxième Sonate, Troisième Sonate (including Sigle), Incises and une page d’éphéméride. Find out more about the concert on WUOL.
In the evening of the same day, Taka Kigawa will be performing Boulez’ complete solo piano music at the DePauw University in Greencastle.
Read a preview article from Greencastle Banner-Graphic.
Kigawa will continue his piano recital tour on 25 August at Le Poisson Rouge in New York, followed by a trip to Japan in November.
The highly acclaimed pianist Taka Kigawa will honour composer and conductor Pierre Boulez with a solo piano recital of the composer’s works 12 Notations, Première Sonate, Troisième Sonate (including Sigle), Incises and une page d’éphéméride on 17 April at the Center for New Music in San Francisco, and, a week later, on 24 April at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires.
From the Center for New Music’s programme:
“Pierre Boulez’s piano pieces have been Taka Kigawa’s specialty program. He has performed those pieces in public numerous times worldwide, and has received lots of acclaim from both critics and audiences alike. The New York Times hailed him, as ‘It was music of Mr. Boulez that spurred him to greater intensity and spontaneity. Mr. Kigawa’s feat deserves the highest praise, especially since it was combined with such alacrity and sensitivity to the musical material’ and ‘Mr. Kigawa recast the (Boulez’s) sonata as an essay in how to apply suppleness to virtuosity, and the result was an energetic but also characterful account.’ And Pierre Boulez himself highly praised Kigawa’s playing his works as ‘I was very much impressed by the brilliant way he performed them. He was precise, and at the same time inventive.’ […] Also this year Kigawa will be touring with the Pierre Boulez Complete Solo Piano Music program in Buenos Aires, Argentina in late April, in New York City in August, and in Japan in November.”
Pierre Boulez at the Venice Biennale, where he was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in October 2012.
Happy 89th Birthday Pierre Boulez!
Ivan Fedele, director of the Biennale’s music sector, on Boulez:
“This is a recognition of the absolute value of an artist who has lived through the history of contemporary music, offering the entire world compositions that, in the opinion of musicologists and artists from around the world, are true masterpieces of modernity.
The Maestro’s work has also expressed itself in the theoretical field with exemplary books that have served as a guide and model for generations of young composers. Furthermore, as a conductor, Boulez has offered interpretations of the classical and contemporary repertoire that are now considered milestones.”
Today, 6 February, Pierre Boulez will receive the 18th annual Cleveland Orchestra Distinguished Service Award in absentia.
Executive Director Gary Hanson on Boulez: "This award is in recognition of our genuine appreciation for Pierre Boulez"s decades of service to The Cleveland Orchestra. He has given us the gift of great music, new music, and the joy of music-making. We are grateful for what he has taught us and honored by his peerless international legacy."
Read more on the website of the Cleveland Orchestra.
Pierre
Boulez’ sur
Incises will be performed on 27 October in the frame of the Pollini
Project at the Teatro alla Scala. Matthias Pintscher conducts the ensemble
intercontemporain.
Excerpt from a conversation between Wolfgang
Fink and Pierre Boulez:
Fink: Incises […] is rather
short, extremely brilliant and with a sense of perpetual motion. Now sur Incises
originates from this piece and goes beyond the scope of pure piano sound.
Boulez: Yes, it is an ensemble for three pianos which in a way represent the main instruments, three harps and three percussions of certain pitch, also timpani, steel drums, glockenspiel etc. I composed the piano piece Incises for the Umberto Micheli Piano Competition which is greatly supported by Maurizio Pollini. First I had in mind to transform this piece into a longer one for Pollini and a group of instrumentalists, a kind of piano concerto although without reference to the traditional form. The literature in concerto form does not appeal to me any more. Therefore I produced a piece for three pianos assuming that there already exists enough interesting literature for two pianos and ensembles, especially in the modern age - take for example Bartok's "Sonata for two pianos and percussion".
Pierre Boulez: sur Incises
for 3 pianos, 3 harps and 3 percussionists | 40'
27.10.2013, Teatro alla Scala, Milano; ensemble intercontemporain, cond. Matthias Pintscher
October is
bachtrack’s contemporary music month, and it is great to see that Arvo
Pärt is featured in the special on Minimalists, and that Pierre Boulez –
together with Stockhausen, Berio, and others – is regarded as one of conemporary music’s “Cutting-Edge Heavyweights”: A generation of composers growing up amongst the
carnage of Hitler’s Europe [that] turned their faces away from the traditional
language of music, which seemed forever tainted by that world, in search of a
new musical grammar.
Boulez on Boulez:
Tom
Service in an interview with Matthias Pintscher on Pierre Boulez’ Pli selon pli
Pli selon pli is definitely one of Pierre's most directly emotional works. The final movement, Tombeau, ends with the word 'mort' ('death') and then there's this huge crescendo in the ensemble. It leaves you completely emotionally torn, asking questions - what condition are we in? How do we go forward? We are so shaken by it, and now it's our turn to move on, or to try to. It's overwhelming.
Tom Service talks to 42-year-old composer and conductor Matthias Pintscher about Pierre Boulez’ Pli selon pli, which will be performed on 5 October at Glasgow’s City Halls. Pintscher conducts the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and soprano Marisol Montalvo.
Read the full article on The Guardian.
Ed Siegel writes on
The Artery about Deutsche Grammophon’s recent release of the 13-CD “Pierre Boulez:
Complete Works” set and about Boulez’s music in general. There is a nice quote
from Bernstein in there (“Curiously enough, the atmosphere he generates is one
of great inner-ness and mystery. Perhaps what it really is a new kind of
mysticism born of new scientific insights”), but also an interesting take on
the warmth of Boulez’s music.
sur Incises, which is mentioned in the article, will be performed in October in Strasbourg by the Ensemble Intercontemporain:
Pierre Boulez: sur Incises
for 3 pianos, 3 harps and 3 percussionists | 40’
3/10/2013, Cité de la musique, Strasbourg; Ensemble Intercontemporain, cond. Pascal
Rophé
Gaspra for ensemble will be performed on 25 September by the TIMF Ensemble under Soo-Yeoul Choi at the Klangspuren Festival.
Other UE composers that are represented at the Klangspuren Festival are Wolfgang Rihm, Pierre Boulez, Georg Friedrich Haas and Johannes Maria Staud.
The New York Philharmonic moves into the Park Avenue Armory in New York tonight for a Philharmonic 360 concert – “Spatial Music from Mozart’s Don Giovanni to Stockhausen’s Gruppen”.
The 55,000-square-foot Thompson Drill Hall (photo) has been turned into a unique concert space, with the orchestra in three groups surrounding the audience.
Alan Gilbert, Magnus Lindberg and Matthias Pintscher conduct the New York Philharmonic.
Programme:
Pierre Boulez: Rituel
in memoriam Bruno Maderna
Mozart: Finale of Act I from Don Giovanni
Karlheinz Stockhausen: Gruppen
Charles Ives: The Unanswered Question
Pierre Boulez receives the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement of the Venice Biennale.
The director of the music sector, Ivan Fedele, stated:
“This is a recognition of the absolute value of an artist who has lived through the history of contemporary music, offering the entire world compositions that, in the opinion of musicologists and artists from around the world, are true masterpieces of modernity.
The Maestro’s work has also expressed itself in the theoretical field with exemplary books that have served as a guide and model for generations of young composers. Furthermore, as a conductor, Boulez has offered interpretations of the classical and contemporary repertoire that are now considered milestones.”
Congratulations maestro!
Read more on the Biennale website
For the first issue of our new newsletter Musikblätter, Pierre Boulez spoke to Universal Edition about his own music.
“Sometimes you discover yourself”
Happy Birthday Pierre Boulez!