Word: boulez
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...other words, Boulez is a pragmatist. At the Philharmonic, he gradually broadened his repertoire to include a variety of musical styles; in opera the would-be dynamiter turned out to be an effective Wagnerian. At his brainchild, IRCAM, Boulez's fellow composers have great stylistic latitude. "I cannot make my personal taste the main criterion," he says. "I am more tolerant than my reputation...
...easy to believe him, for in person Boulez is affable and charming. Of average height, balding, with a pleasant Gallic face, he could pass for a friendly greengrocer in his native Loire region. Yet throughout his career, his work has often been criticized for what some perceive as a fundamental coldness. Boulez resents the charge and defends his musicianship. Recalling the hostile reception he met from the fiercely proprietary Bayreuth musicians before his first Ring, he notes, "When you are attached to contemporary music, immediately they suppose you don't know the classic repertoire. But I think I can study...
...Boulez's music, derived from the twelve-tone system of Arnold Schoenberg, is devoid of conventional melodies and harmonies. Instead it is made up of bursts of tones that are combined into seemingly cacophonous passages, which tax both the ear and the mind. It can sound dense and abstruse at first acquaintance, yet, like the notion that Boulez is unfeeling, this too is a misper- ception. Forbidding though his music undeniably can be, it amply repays careful, open-minded listening, gradually revealing its sweep and surge...
Repons is a good illustration. Musically and technologically, it is Boulez's most ambitious, unorthodox undertaking to date. In a large gymnasium (the Los Angeles performances were at the John Wooden Center on the UCLA campus), a centrally located small orchestra of 24 is surrounded by six soloists scattered around the room, performing at various times on amplified xylophone, vibraphone, cimbalom, harp, celesta, electric organ, two pianos and percussion. The sounds are fed into a bank of computer-synthesizers, which alter and transform them according to a predetermined program and project them out again through loudspeakers hung over and around...
Fittingly, Boulez's tour will end in New York, where he will be reunited with his old orchestra. That program is vintage Boulez: Stravinsky, Debussy (the obscure, elusive Jeux), and a work of his own, Improvisations sur Mallarme, I, II, and III. The conductor's six seasons in Manhattan were not, on the whole, happy ones. "My life would have been simplified by a more positive response," he observes dryly. But he is likely to find a more receptive climate for his ideas now. Today's audience has been exposed to a range of idioms from serialism to minimalism. Boulez...