Hailed as one of the most important voices in post-war European culture, composer and conductor Pierre Boulez’s 90th birthday on 26 March 2015 will be celebrated by a series of concerts and events around the world; and here, George Benjamin pays tribute to his friend and fellow composer.
Boulez began to be noticed by the British press in the early 1950s. At the beginning of the decade the Observer’s Eric Blom, reviewing an article by the young composer, asked whether Britain would find him “entertaining”? In 1952, Boulez wrote an essay entitled “Schoenberg is Dead,” vowing to take music forward a year after the modern icon’s death. Five years later, after producing compositions such as Le Marteau sans maître, the paper was running regular reviews of his work.
During the 1960s Boulez gained an international reputation not only as a composer but also as a conductor, particularly of the 20th-century repertoire - something explored by Peter Heyworth in the Observer and the Guardian’s Edward Greenfield.
To coincide with his final concert as the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor in July 1975 (a position he’d held since 1971), the Guardian ran a number of articles looking at Boulez’s record and impact.
Boulez had been living on and off in Germany, but to tempt him back to France, President Pompidou offered to build him a musical research centre in Paris. The result was Ircam (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), which opened in 1977. By the following decade, he was being acknowledged by some as “one of the dominant musical figures of our time”.
In 1989, Terry Coleman interviewed the conductor ahead of his return to London to conduct a series of concerts with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
