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Boulez, the ‘charming but demanding eminence grise of the classical music world’.
Boulez, the ‘charming but demanding eminence grise of the classical music world’. Photograph: Lawrence K Ho/LA Times via Getty Images
Boulez, the ‘charming but demanding eminence grise of the classical music world’. Photograph: Lawrence K Ho/LA Times via Getty Images

Pierre Boulez: 10 key works

This article is more than 8 years old

There are few parts of the classical music world that do not bear the mark of Boulez’s influence today. Tom Service picks 10 key works that represent the best of the composer and conductor, whose death aged 90 was announced earlier today

It’s a terrible prospect, imagining a musical world without Pierre Boulez. And yet, thanks to his influence as composer, conductor and cultural leader; as polemicist, teacher and fiery spirit of avant-garde adventure; and later as a charming, but demanding, eminence grise of contemporary musical life, we don’t have to imagine it.

Boulez’s achievements in changing every part of the fabric of classical musical culture all over the world are indelible. In Bayreuth, where he transformed the performance practice of Wagner’s works. In London and New York, where in the 1970s he embarked on a mission to transform orchestral programmes and establish a performance practice for contemporary music. Or at the Lucerne festival, where he established the Lucerne Festival Academy to cement the repertoires of new music in the minds and hearts of some of the world’s most talented young musicians and coached the next generation of composers. Or in Paris, where so much of the city’s musical life is formed in the image of his sonic dreams: IRCAM, that place of electronic and acoustic musical experimentation whose underground bunkers you’ll have walked over if you’ve ever been to the Pompidou Museum – it’s right under the Stravinsky Fountain; or the Ensemble Intercontemporain, his new-music ensemble that bears living, breathing testament to the power of his music in performance, and even the new Philharmonie, the latest result of Boulez’s cultural vision and powers of political persuasion.

But above all, there’s his music and his music-making, which will remain in the permanently inspirational present tense for all of us as listeners, performers and composers. Here’s my introduction to his musical world via 10 key works.

1. Piano Sonata No 2 (1948)

Written in Boulez’s early 20s, in 1948, his second Piano Sonata simultaneously blows apart classical convention – sonata form, fugue – but creates its own monumental structure of irresistible intensity.

2. Le marteau san maître (1955)

The 1955 work that set the seal on Boulez’s reputation as the “lion flayed alive” – his teacher Olivier Messiaen’s description of him as a student – of the avant-garde. Yet this is music, we can now hear, that is as beguilingly, exotically beautiful as it full of explosive imagination.

3. Pli selon pli (1957-1962)

The ultimate version of Boulez’s Mallarmé cycle: music that’s by turns ravishing and revolutionary. At over an hour, it’s also his longest work.

4. Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna (1974-75)

Written in memory of his friend and collaborator, the great Italian composer and conductor.

5. Répons (1981-84)

Boulez’s most ambitious masterpiece of electronic and acoustic fusion, music that creates a new kind of cosmic resonance from its ensemble and their ethereally, electronically transformed sounds.

6. Notations (orchestrations) (1978/1984/1997)

These five orchestral expansions of Boulez’s early aphoristic piano pieces are among the most scintillating, gorgeous, and thrillingly dramatic pieces in his entire catalogue.

7. Dérive 2 (1988/2002/2006)

Recorded in 2012, Boulez’s performance with the Ensemble Intercontemporain creates a golden thread of connection through the gilded sonic labyrinth of Dérive 2.

8. Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen

Landmark in every sense, here is Boulez’s performance of Patrice Chéreau’s centenary production of the Ring Cycle that shocked and then seduced audiences at Bayreuth. Filmed in 1980, it’s still among the most searingly insightful readings of the cycle, musically and dramatically, ever performed.

9. Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande

Another of the highlights of Boulez’s operatic career, this 1992 performance of Debussy’s Pelléas in Peter Stein’s production at Welsh National Opera reveals the expressivity, focus, and clarity that Boulez brought to everything he conducted.

10. Debussy: Jeux

A brilliantly bizarre demonstration of Boulez’s virtuosity as a conductor: recorded in an earlier epoch, here he is conducting Debussy’s most enigmatic orchestral score from memory – and wearing shades … The work’s riddles are solved in this performance in a way you only rarely experience.

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