I was driving without a baton. He said he did not need because the fingers correspond to ten batons. The originality of driving with their hands, said the obituaries, serves to illustrate the life of the French composer Pierre Boulez, intensely dedicated to finding a new place for contemporary classical music.
The French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez died on Tuesday night aged 90. Boulez died in Baden-Baden, Germany, where he lived.
Her death was announced on Wednesday by the family in a statement released by the Philharmonie de Paris, a new musical house of Paris whose opening was involved “. For all those who you were close and they could enjoy their creative energy, his artistic requirement, their availability and generosity, their presence will remain vivid and intense”
Last year when turned 90, the Cité de la Musique in Paris, gave him an exhibition simply entitled Pierre Boulez , which traced the biography of this important name in the music scene of the second half of the twentieth century. It was at the Cité de la Musique, moreover, that Boulez founded in the 1970s, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, a reference of avant-garde music. At that time, also created for the Centre Pompidou, the IRCAM (Institute of Research and Music and Acoustics Coordination), also specially dedicated to contemporary classical music creation.
“Pierre Boulez did not fail to compose, of think music and to work for its entry in the city and in everyday life, “noted the Cité de la Musique on the anniversary of display advertising.
His life was dedicated to the diffusion of contemporary music, evolution of your audience and creation, writes on the site of the Gulbenkian Music Service. Boulez was a frequent visitor in Portugal, especially in the Gulbenkian, which was five times with the Ensemble Intercontemporain. But also directed at the Port in 2001, the Orchestre de Paris and the (his) Ensemble Intercontemporain at the concert that opened the Great Cycle Orchestras of the European Capital of Culture – and where he played works by Schoenberg and Bartók. This year, Jorge Sampaio, former President of the Republic, handed him the Grand Cross of the Order of Santiago.
“A brilliant intelligence”
Antonio Jorge Pacheco, artistic director of the House of Music, keeps in his office a photograph that records the situation where, on April 22, 2010, participated with Pierre Boulez in a debate at the Cité de la Musique in Paris.
At that time, and since last year, has maintained a close relationship with the composer had known personally in Oporto in 2001, when the said concert at the Coliseum. “It was a huge sympathy man with a brilliant intelligence,” says Pacheco, lamenting the loss that it considers “one of the great figures of European twentieth century culture,” and that “marks the end of an era in music history.” As the newspaper writes Le Monde in your obituary the disappearance of Boulez “puts an end to truly avant-garde musical twentieth century he contributed significantly to shaping with other composers born in the 20s,” as Bruno Maderna (1920- 1973), Luigi Nono (1924-1990), Luciano Berio (1925-2003), Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007), György Ligeti (1923-2006) and even Henri Pousseur (from 1929 to 2009).
“In addition to being a composer and a brilliant conductor, Pierre Boulez was a thinker who left a work also important in the books he wrote.”
Play worldwide
Despite moving in the narrow world of classical music, Pierre Boulez accomplished the feat, as he wrote the French newspaper Libération , to be known and touch the world whole, it is “regarded as one of the most influential personalities of the musical world.” The newspaper reminds theoretical and educator “of great clarity” that “advocated tirelessly the place of new music in the concert programs and encouraged the most demanding musical creation.”
As a conductor, was ahead of the Cleveland Orchestra (1967-1972), the BBC Symphony Orchestra (1971-1975) and the Philharmonic Orchestra of New York (1971-1977). It celebrated its participation in the production of Ring Centennial at the Bayreuth Festival (1976-1980), along with Patrice Chéreau.
This “ enfant terrible “, which went into exile in Germany in 1966 because of the conservative attitude of the French musical world, he said in an interview with Publico, made by Augusto M. Seabra in 2000, which was to be the” role “of the musician, who preferred the word “should”, “. What is important to me is that a musician between the institutions and that if you are not satisfied with them, fight for its transformation, create new institutions or modify the existing” only in 1976 accept return France to founding the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the first French group dedicated to contemporary music largely financed by the state.
In this interview also spoke of the act of writing and because he liked to use concepts like “spiral” to explain this experience, beyond the “idea” that is always at the source. The word “spiral” was evoked to say that a work “can end up or not” and because “it is open, you can continue.”
The purpose of his work Pli selon pli (Portrait de Mallarmé) who said he worked in full utopia, he explained exactly what he meant by “spiral” applied to the composition: “There were several works that are felt incomplete. There are works that force me to go further. [...] I felt I could not even meet at my own gesture of orchestra leader at the time, that it took a long and realization conditions were not met, and therefore reviewed the work. I do not think a work is ‘finished’, it is always ‘unfinished’, but there is a moment that I feel is ‘closed’. “
Boulez began working on this project for soprano voice and orchestra in 1957, having made several versions until 1990.
A before and after Boulez
For the musician Pedro Amaral, who thoroughly studied his work the purpose of the thesis dedicated to Stockhausen, friend of the French composer, is simply a before and after Boulez music in the second half of the twentieth century. It’s because? Because he could muster, soon after the war, the various trends dispersed the first half, making a coherent summary. “It should be the Boulez an extraordinary synthesis of modernist heterogeneity of the early twentieth century – [Igor] Stravinsky, [Maurice] Ravel, [Claude] Debussy … Your structuralism is just that – a solid synthesis and founder,” argues the composer Portuguese, current artistic director of the Metropolitan Orchestra of Lisbon.
When Pierre Boulez began working, argues Pedro Amaral, contemporary music, including structuralism, was brushed off the professional circuit. What the composer has done, and thanks to his work as a cultural dynamic, while founder orchestras and research centers (the famous IRCAM), is impose it on many of the relevant production structures internationally. “Boulez institutionalized contemporary music, professionalized it. Only he could do it and this is one of their extraordinary contributions. “
By dividing its activities between the composition, with” emblematic works “as Le Marteau sans Maître , ask 1954 from the poetry of René Char, theoretical production, especially Penser la Musique Aujourd’hui , 1963, the maestro’s career and organizer of musical life, Pierre Boulez had a “preenchidíssimo route” and yet saw the realization of a dream -. the inauguration of the home of the Philharmonic of Paris, just a year ago
If you had to choose only one of his compositions, Pedro Amaral highlight, too probably the “masterpiece” Pli selon Pli : “I choose it for its quality unquestionable but also because it has a mirror in theory in Penser la Musique Aujourd’hui . The two are indeed the mirror of each other, and are closely linked to Darmstadt. “
Pedro Amaral refers to the German city where they met in the 1950s and 60s, young composers such as Boulez, Stockhausen, Luigi Nono and Luciano Berio forming a nucleus that became known as the school of Darmstadt. In addition to Pli selon Pli , and work from 1954 that launched him as a composer, the artistic director of the Metropolitan stresses still Répons , the work of the 1980s (1981-1988) also with multiple versions, in which the French composer “puts the electronics and computers to interact in real time with the orchestra”, and Notations , 1990s part and in which Boulez makes a trip to past: “He gets on very short works, which creates when he was 18 or 19 years, and makes its recovery for large orchestra. It is this process that shows us how we can take to limit the art of writing, as we can, with very little, do a lot. “
The director of the Music House recalls that Boulez was repeatedly” accused sectarianism and dry everything around them. ” It is an idea that says not correspond to reality. “He was always an open and attentive spirit and supported young composers followed even when different from their aesthetic,” he notes. And cites as an example the fact of having written to disk a piece of Frank Zappa.
Still illustrate the fact Boulez have worked and directed “a vast repertoire,” Pacheco recalls that the conductor you confided in one of his meetings, he lacked only “direct the Verdi the past few years.” “But now it’s too late for that,” he lamented.
In 2009, when he was directly responsible for the Remix Ensemble, António Jorge Pacheco invited Boulez to attend a concert of this Porto formation of contemporary music at the Center Pompidou, at a time when already projected to present a retrospective of work by the French composer at the Music House. At the end of the concert in Paris, the conductor surprised him with this statement: not only want to direct the Remix, when he returned to Porto, as you would in this city the world premiere of a new version of his play Répons It would however finish. “It was a ‘gift’ unexpected,” says Pacheco
The project of retrospective advanced, and Pierre Boulez should come to Paris to inaugurate the Year France (2012), in what would be the associate artist at the Music House . But illness prevented the realization of this will. His work has been presented throughout the year at Remix and the Symphony Orchestra of Porto, but the conductor and composer not come back into the city where he had been in 2001, when he met the maquette that Rem Koolhaas will design for the house music, and whose construction was watching from a distance, said Pacheco
Pedro Amaral, the conductor of the Metropolitan, have no doubt that had it not blinded, Pierre Boulez would have created to the end:. “The drama Boulez is that it never driven color, never wrote without looking at the paper, without the exercise of creation passed by writing. “
With the composer’s death, says Pedro Amaral, disappears the last of Darmstadt school visionaries, “the last of the truly modernists of the second half of the twentieth century.”
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