Composer, conductor, polemicist and iconoclast Pierre Boulez was born 100 years ago and, on his death in 2016, left classical music utterly changed. Ahead of two festivals in which the London Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony celebrate a musician with whom both orchestras had close and enduring relationships we speak to composers, conductors and performers who worked with the legendary musician, and tell us why his music remains essential listening – so long as we put our ‘Boulez ears’ on.
‘Pli Selon Pli is simply one of the greatest works of the 20th century’
George Benjamin, composer and conductor
In everything that he did, Boulez was completely individual. He was one of the figures who remade music in the aftermath of the catastrophe of the second world war. “The artists I admire have not followed tradition but have been able to force tradition to follow them. We need to restore the spirit of irreverence in music,” he said.
His music has a very particular sensibility and style. His works have extreme beauty and precision. His output wasn’t enormous but the range was wide. Pli Selon Pli is simply one of the greatest works of the 20th century. It’s just magical music. Or …explosante-fixe… a beautiful piece involving computerised electronics and flute solo. I also love the late work Sur Incises.
As a conductor, too, he was hugely influential. He programmed composers such as Bartók, Varèse and the Second Viennese School, as well as Messiaen, Ligeti, Birtwistle and Carter widely and secured their place in concert halls across the western world. The very precise way he used his hand – he didn’t use a baton – helped communicate to players across the arena of an orchestra exactly where they were in the bar and exactly what he wanted. He had also a fantastic ear and the ability to hear things with great precision, which also affects enormously the way people play.
I believe in individuals having an impassioned vision of genius, and that’s what he had. And what I’m personally interested in, is how he realised his dreams and made beautiful music, and that’s enough.
‘Woe betide those who didn’t up their game’
Brindley Sherratt, singer
I worked with Boulez for 13 years while in the BBC Singers. We were his go-to choir because we could sight-read very quickly and weren’t intimidated by even his most fiendish vocal writing.
You need to count and you need to have a good idea where the pitch is, and the text was often quite tricky. We would usually work first with a conductor for a week or so who’d help us on where the beats in the bar are – you often had to work it out mathematically, before starting rehearsals with Boulez. He would stand on the podium and the way he used his hands and arms to show you where the strong and the weak beats were would make the music seem like it was Mozart, it was so straightforward. It was like the sun came out!
He was very focused and straight-faced when conducting and woe betide the musician who didn’t up their game to perform his music with the commitment it required. The Ring Cycle he conducted at Bayreuth in 1976 is for me the best one out there. But he also had a cheeky sense of humour. I remember a last-minute rehearsal before one Prom when all 28 BBC Singers squeezed into the conductor’s green room. You could barely see him, so squashed were we. “Good ’eavens,” he said, “It’s like a Scottish taxicab.”
Another time we were performing with him in London, and the next day doing the same programme in Birmingham Symphony Hall. My colleagues and I were chatting during a break and he came over to speak to us. I thought he was about to offer some insights into the piece we were performing, or some philosophical thoughts on the music, but instead he said: “Excuse me, to get to Birmingham … better M40 or M1?”
I never get to sing any of it any more. I don’t understand why his music is not done more often.
‘Working with him was life-changing’
Barbara Hannigan, soprano and conductor
I was 19 when Boulez came to Toronto with the Ensemble Intercontemporain. I was so excited and went alone as I couldn’t get any of my singer friends to come with me! It was some 15 years later that I first sang several of Boulez’s works with other conductors, and then, in 2009 the call came to sing Berg and Webern chamber music in Berlin with Boulez conducting.
I loved working with him: he was kind, gentle and so completely about the music. He asked me to sing the title role in Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol with the Berlin Philharmonic in 2010. And, the following year I sung Pli Selon Pli with Boulez conducting, on a European tour that started at the Lucerne festival. It was an honour to stand beside him and sing this 60-minute masterpiece for soprano and orchestra. It was life-changing. I learned about space and time, I learned about complete commitment to every sound, whether mine or my colleague’s, I learned how to take distance, and how to be present.
This turned out to be Boulez’s last major tour. His eyesight was failing and his health was also compromised. I wrote down everything he said during rehearsals in my score, whether it was to me or the flutes or the double-basses, and dated everything. Those scores are so precious. It was a beautiful, sensual exercise in extreme focus and purity of music.
‘His ear was second to none’
Antonio Pappano, conductor
When I was younger I used to listen endlessly to Le Marteau sans Maître, spellbound by the type of writing, how it sounded and how difficult it must be to perform. Later, as I got to know Boulez’s work as a conductor and played his music on the piano, I came to appreciate his sense of craft, structure, and its mathematical side.
He was an amazing colourist as a composer – try his pieces for orchestra, Notations. Their emotion and complexity is wondrous, and his orchestration is utterly beguiling. And, as a conductor, his ear was second to none. Through his ability to make textures clear and pure he helped the listener to listen better somehow.
The way he programmed and championed modern music makes him a hugely important figure in 20th-century music. But he didn’t like everything – the more tonally based music of Britten, Vaughan Williams or maybe even Shostakovich, didn’t appeal to him. I think that Boulez was responsible for sidelining a lot of music, if I’m honest – he was a controversial figure as well as being a champion. But as a conductor of Wagner, he made everything lighter, more transparent and text driven. And this was a revolution.
‘He wanted to shock’
Martyn Brabbins, conductor
Boulez made people think. He wanted to shock and provoke: postwar, that was what was needed to move things on in music and culture. The radical statements of his youth – burn down the opera houses and suchlike – were probably intended to be provocative as much as anything else – he did after all of course conduct in opera houses later in life.
All music requires creative engagement from the listener, but Boulez’s compositions particularly were not designed to be consumed in a passive way. There’s a cerebral nature to the works that requires one to anticipate being taken on an unexpected journey. If you go to a concert with the wrong ears on – your Rachmaninov ears rather than your Boulez ones, say, you’re going to be in trouble!
I saw him conduct several times and was always struck by its austerity: he conducted more from the head rather than the heart. When I met him however – he was at a performance I conducted of his Pli Selon Pli in Edinburgh more than 20 years ago, he was charming and complimentary. I think the austere facade belied the reality of the man inside, much like his music, which is sensuous, beautiful and exotic.
‘He told me to imagine water dripping from my fingers’
Tamara Stefanovich, pianist
Boulez wanted to jolt us out of our comfort zone where music was merely a bourgeois pastime; he ignited the necessity for us to be in contact with art of our own time. I’d gone through my early musical education cheerfully unaware of him as a conductor and composer until one winter morning in Cologne I saw a poster with his name and Structures II on it and I bought a ticket. It was the beginning of a lifelong connection with the man and his ecstatic music.
His Second Piano Sonata has been a source of energy for more than 20 years. I was forced to pause my career for much of the 90s due to the Balkan wars and consequent visa problems, and this work became my inspiration, and restarted my career. I worked for eight months on this Mount Everest of piano literature, and its mix of courageous, revolutionary and youthful energy transformed me and eclipsed my limitations.
This led to further collaborations including my playing with him as a conductor and a Grammy-nominated recording. He taught me so much. To put care into the breath, the shape of the phrase and to bring the right balance of discipline and freedom to each note. He talked about his music and playing using metaphors of bee hives, or waves; he told me to imagine water dripping from your fingers. His maxim – responsibility is at the very beginning of each creative force – remains my manifesto. If given the possibility to respond we should definitely use this ability responsibly.
‘It felt as if you could hear him listening’
Maxime Pascal, conductor
I was a student when I first came across Boulez’s music – a borrowed recording of his Second Piano Sonata. I was hypnotised by the sound and the dazzling dimension of his piano writing. It felt full of fury and yet there was a total freedom to it. It was music that seemed to come from a raw, deeply emotional place. It opened my ears to a whole new world.
Later, when I moved to Paris to study, Boulez was very active: he regularly conducted the Orchestre de Paris, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and had many projects with Ircam [the Pompidou centre-based Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique that Boulez founded]. As a conductor he influenced and inspired me more than any other. I recall listening to his recording of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. The tempo was slower than usual, and what struck me was how it felt as if you could hear him listening. You could sense his extreme attention to detail. It was as though he invited you to experience the piece through his own meticulous way of hearing it.
Working with him, he gave me two key pieces of conducting advice. It has to be firm, and it has to be flexible. His entire conducting style was built on this balance. It is extremely assured and precise, yet incredibly free.
Where to start with his music? I’d suggest works that incorporate electronics. Anthèmes II, or Répons – one of the first mixed-music works ever written, and still one of the best. Le Marteau sans Maître is also extraordinarily powerful. The first time I heard it, at the Cité de la Musique in Paris, I only realised as I heard the applause that I had been so absorbed I had been sitting completely tense and immobile and now I had pins and needles throughout my body.
‘He taught me to stand my ground’
Olga Neuwirth, composer
Boulez’s music is an indestructible resource for finding one’s own voice, for inspiring composers to push against the norms of a classical music business – even with fury if necessary, like he did in his early years in both his music and his statements. He taught me to stand my ground in rehearsals – something not always considered appropriate for composers, especially female ones.
Répons is the work of his I return to the most for its visionary combination of space, traditional instruments and live electronic transformations in a flow of time and colours. He was a man of vast reading, a fast thinker, a curious cosmopolitan as well as a learned diplomat, who taught me, and us all, to listen. I hope his music is being played in 100 years’ time. Ars longa, vita brevis.
