The French composer, conductor and musical polemicist Pierre Boulez was born 100 years ago this week. His long life – he died in 2016 – was devoted to promoting new music: his own, a relatively small but challenging oeuvre, but also 20th-century composers he felt an affinity with, notably Béla Bartók, Anton Webern and György Ligeti. Boulez’s career is being celebrated on Sunday with an entire day devoted to him on BBC Radio 3. Boulez Day will culminate in a live concert from the Barbican that includes one of his most ambitious works, Pli selon Pli. It is an unashamedly anti-populist piece of programming: only Radio 3, which is used to having a niche audience, could devote a whole day to so “difficult” a composer as Boulez.
Radio 3 is treating Boulez Day as a taster for a new 40-part series, starting on 6 April, called 20th Century Radicals, which showcases a range of composers from the relatively well known – Berio, Birtwistle, Kurtág, Messiaen, Stockhausen – to more obscure musical pioneers such as Mauricio Kagel, Alvin Lucier and Éliane Radigue. It is a bold attempt to make sense of serialism, atonality and the postwar musical experimentation that alienated many listeners.
