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Pierre Boulez

May 2025

  • Cassie Kinoshi and Ensemble Intercontemporain at the Barbican 27th May 2025

    Cassie Kinoshi x Ensemble intercontemporain review – vivid and anarchic, new music programme full of thrills

    A memorable work by Hannah Kendall and Cassie Kinoshi’s [Untitled] – featuring virtuoso turntabling and choreography - were paired with Boulez’s visionary Sur Incises, all conducted by rising star Nicolò Umberto Foron

April 2025

  • Pierre Boulez

    Pierre Boulez was exacting – but never in a bad tempo

    Letters: Celia Craig shares a fond memory of the late French composer and conductor

March 2025

  • Tamara Stefanovich

    Total Immersion: Pierre Boulez review – still refreshingly alien

    The hands of pianist Tamara Stefanovich executed a mesmerising ballet as the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Martyn Brabbins saluted this revolutionary composer
  • Pierre Boulez conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in New York in 2005

    The Guardian view on 20th-century composers: play it again, maestro

    Radio 3’s celebration of Pierre Boulez is a chance to revisit “difficult” music and break down divisions between old and new styles
  • Pierre Boulez working with Quatuor Diotima in 2012.

    Boulez: Livre pour Quatuor album review – first complete recording illuminates its vertiginous contrasts

    Moments of stillness and animation, spareness and exuberance, are highlighted in a confident performance of a work started in 1948 – now finally recorded with its fourth movement

January 2025

  • No shortage of intensity … Maxime Pascal conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in a celebration of Pierre Boulez.

    LSO/Pascal review – less is more with brand new Boulez homages

    World premieres by Olga Neuwirth, Rafael Marina Arcaro and Lara Agar celebrated Pierre Boulez’s centenary, with Maxime Pascal a hyper-expressive conductor
  • The LSO conducted by Sir Simon Rattle perform Pierre Boulez Éclat, George Benjamin's lyrical world premiere to celebrate Sir Simon Rattle’s 70th birthday-Interludes and Aria from Lessons in Love and Violence (with soprano-conductor Barbara Hannigan, singing the aria) and Johannes Brahms Symphony No 4 in the Barbican Hall on Thursday 9 Jan. 2025. Photos by Mark Allan

    LSO/Rattle review – old, new, borrowed and Boulez for conductor’s birthday concerts

    World premieres by George Benjamin and Mark-Anthony Turnage were centrepieces of two concerts celebrating Rattle’s 70th, but it was symphonies – Brahms and Vaughan Williams – that were the high points
  • Pierre Boulez.

    ‘He jolted us out of our comfort zone’: Antonio Pappano, Martyn Brabbins and more on Pierre Boulez

    Ahead of his centenary celebrations, composers, conductors and performers explain why the French iconoclast’s music is simply spellbinding

April 2024

  • Peter Eötvös rehearsing with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Cologne, 2017.

    Peter Eötvös obituary

    Hungarian conductor of modernist music who went on to compose operas with texts ranging from Three Sisters to Angels in America

February 2024

  • David Lumsdaine in Sydney, 1996

    David Lumsdaine obituary

    Australian composer long resident in Britain whose music uses complex means to produce a direct result

July 2020

  • Daniel Barenboim and fellow musicians rehearsing for the Festival for New Music Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, july 9-13th 2020.

    House music
    House music: Andrew Clements' watching and listening picks

    This week, Andrew Clements gets his teeth into Barenboim’s festival of new music, looks back in wonder at Wunderlich, and looks forward to looking back to the Proms

March 2017

  • the conductor Daniel Barenboim

    Hommage à Boulez CD review – fabulous and compelling bow to a modern master

January 2017

  • Pierre Boulez<br>21st February 1964: French composer, conductor and pianist Pierre Boulez. (Photo by Erich Auerbach/Getty Images) white;format portrait;male;Music;Pianist;Personality;French;AB 4957;AB

    Music blog
    Boulez in the jungle: avant-garde music's indigenous soul

    Distracted from his composing and iconoclasm by the necessity of earning some money, a young Pierre Boulez found work with a Parisian theatre company. Three trips he made with them to South America changed him and his music forever

June 2016

  • Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic

    Berlin Phil: Europa Concerts 1991-2015 DVD review – a set of special things to savour

    A quarter century of broadcast Europa Concerts are brought together in this extensive DVD set that features some exceptional performances

May 2016

  • Pierre Boulez conducting in the mid-1960s.

    Pierre Boulez: Young Composer and Conductor CD review – hallmark clarity and precision

  • Pierre Boulez working with members of the Diotima Quartet for the revision of the Livre pour Quatuor in 2012.

    Boulez: Livre pour Quatuor 'Révisé' CD review – rapturous beauty from the Diotimas

February 2016

  • Ensemble Intercontemporain press image supplied by Jonathan Carvell <jcarvell@wigmore-hall.org.uk>

    Ensemble Intercontemporain review – modernist masterpieces played with authority and sparkle

    Composer Aurélio Edler-Copes made his presence felt with a new work that held its own alongside Debussy and Bartók

January 2016

  • British potato seeds in an egg box.

    Brief letters
    Easter fix is a hot potato for vegetable gardeners

    Letters: Currently determined by phases of the moon, which affects the water table, it leads to the tradition of planting potatoes on Good Friday
  • Pierre Boulez at the Edinburgh Festival, September 1965.

    From the Guardian archive
    On Boulez: ' There is no point in pretending that I understand his music but it enthrals me'

    5 September 1965: The Observer’s Peter Heyworth writes about Pierre Boulez after a performance at the 1965 Edinburgh festival
  • Pierre Boulez.

    double quotation markPierre Boulez: 'He was one of the naughtiest of great artists'

    Gerard McBurney
    Gerard McBurney, creator of multimedia performance A Pierre Dream, remembers his impish friend – the conductor, composer and provocateur
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