David Dalle
Thursday January 23rd, 2025 with David Dalle
The centenary of Pierre Boulez; new Canadian music; Omar Sosa and Seckou Keita.

2025 marks the centenary of Pierre Boulez (Mar 26 1925-Jan 26 2016), and I was very self-indulgent and as a Christmas gift to myself, picked up a new box set on Deutsche Grammophon, "Boulez The Conductor", released to mark this centenary which includes the complete recordings of Pierre Boulez on Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, and Philips. So, during 2025 we will hear a lot of music conducted and composed by Pierre Boulez. Boulez, growing up learning the piano, singing and playing chamber music. As a teenager, he decided he wanted to pursue music professionally, moving to Paris in 1943 with the hopes of studying at the famed Paris Conservatoire. He was not accepted to study piano, but was accepted to study harmony and composition. In 1944, he was invited to study advanced composition with Olivier Messiaen, who was his most important teacher. At the start of 1945 he attended a private concert of Schoenberg's Wind Quintet, one of Schoenberg's earliest works to employ 12 tone serialism. This was a revelation for Boulez. In the fall of 1945 he was registered as a student at the Conservatoire, but boycotted professors he found lacking in imagination and started a petition for Messiaen to become a full professor. In the winter of 1946 he immersed himself in Japanese and Balinese music, as well as African drumming, and almost chose to become an ethnomusicologist. 1946 also saw the first performances of his compositions and he was also engaged as music director for the theatre Compagnie Renaud-Barrault, a post he held for nine years. It greatly expanded his world, through tours in Europe and South America, as well as giving him practical experience working with professional musicians. This was also a time of intense composing for Boulez, and he composed one of his seminal works, the piano sonata no. 2 in 1948. He also met other radical young composers of his generation. He met John Cage in Paris in 1949 and Cage brought back a copy of the score for the 2nd piano sonata and arranged its US premiere in 1950, which led to his lifelong collaboration with American pianist David Tudor. This work launched Boulez into the forefront of avant-garde music. In 1952, he met Karlheinz Stockhausen who had come to Paris to study with Messiaen. Also in 1952 he attended the International Summer Course for New Music in Darmstadt. Founded in 1946, it became globally famous as a centre for new music. There he met other young composers such as Luigi Nono and Luciano Berio. In 1954 he started a concert series, which became known as Le Domaine musical, focusing on three areas: pre-War music which was unfamiliar in Paris such as the 2nd Viennese school, music of the new generation, and forgotten music from the past. It is through these concerts that Boulez became a conductor, which began as a way to save money, as conducting the concerts himself was a lot cheaper! Boulez would go on to a storied international conducting career, including heading the New York Philharmonic as Bernstein's successor from 1971-1979, as well as the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Later on he was principal guest conductor for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. He also appeared as a guest conductor for many other orchestras and made many recordings. Boulez also founded several other institutions, including the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in 1977 for which Boulez was director from its founding until 1992. This centre in Paris had a large focus on computer and electronic music. Boulez also founded the Ensemble Intercontemporain in 1976, a virtuoso ensemble focused on new music. We will hear many recordings with this group. Over the course of 2025, we will hear some compositions by Boulez, as well a lot of other music conducted by Boulez. During his tenure at the New York Philharmonic and the BBC, he did conduct a fair amount of mainstream repertoire, but his recording output is almost entirely devoted to 20th century music. We will hear two pieces from the beginning and end of his long career, starting with his first composition to ever be publicly performed, his "Douze notations" for piano: twelve aphoristic piano pieces each 12 bars long. They were composed in December 1945 and received their premiere on the 12th February 1946. Boulez's compositional output is relatively small. I am certain his six decade international conducting career interfered with his composing, as it did for predecessors such as Leonard Bernstein and Mahler. But also because Boulez never considered a composition "complete" and was always open to revising and reworking his music, for example, reworking these early "notations" for orchestra occupied Boulez the rest of his long life! We will hear a piece first composed in 1988 and revised in 2002 and 2006, "Dérive 2" for eleven instruments. Boulez's music is also famous for being challenging listening, and though there is a lot of truth in that, his music is also extremely rewarding and beautiful. "Dérive 2" is very easy on the ears, with beautiful, constantly shifting textures. We will also hear the shorter "Dérive 1" for six instruments which makes a good introduction to its longer partner.