Word: boulez
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...Marteau created a mild sensation at its first performance three years ago. After an interval in which Webern's fame has grown tremendously, Boulez' piece has become more accessible, although it remains a rather tough puzzle. Certainly it has far more surface attraction than the Stockhausen recorded here: Boulez call for alto flute, xylorymba, vibraphone, guitar, viola, and several exotic percussion instruments. Four of the nine sections are settings of surrealistic poetry by Rene Char; the contralto Margery MacKay displays here an engagingly warm and sensuous voice. Practically all of the music moves at a furious tempo; this speed, coupled...
...Marteau one recognizes Boulez' individuality; it is far from being merely French Webern played at high speed. Many listeners will be charmed by the piece--few will be charmed by Zeitmasse ("Tempo"), for woodwind quintet (with English horn substituted for horn). Where Boulez is witty and Gallic, Stockhausen is ponderous and Teutonic. The piece is based on an exceedingly complicated schedule of ratios, educations, and formula borrowed from the forbidding world of electronic music. What the uninitiated listener hears is a strange web of sound, frequently frightening and dense as all five instruments sweep from one extreme of their range...
...individual thus described: charming, highly gifted French Composer-Conductor-Pianist Pierre Boulez, 33. The name is virtually unknown in the U.S., but Americans are sure to hear more of both him and his music, although he makes satanic demands on both listener and performer...
...First Words. A listener to a new Boulez cantata once recalled the story of the man who took his first bath: "I can't say I liked it, but I think it's something everybody ought to go through once." Despite such reactions, Auvergne-born Pierre Boulez (rhymes with who says), organizer and director of Paris' successful Domaine musical concerts of new music, has established himself securely as the undisputed darling of European music's Young Turks. A new Columbia recording* of his 1955 cantata Le Marteau sans maitre, to a text by Surrealist Poet Rene...
...Boulez, Tchaikovsky is "abominable," Brahms "a bore," Twelve-Tone Pioneer Arnold Schoenberg an arrested post-Romantic who "discovered the words but never found the proper syntax for them." Just about the only older composers for whom Boulez has a kind word: Schoenberg's late pupil Anton Webern, and France's 49-year-old Organist-Composer Olivier Messiaen, from whom Boulez sought composition instruction after giving Paris' traditionalist Conservatoire the back of his hand ("The composition professors were imbeciles"). From Webern, Boulez derived and refined Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique to its uttermost austerity, and from Messiaen...