It’s hard in our current climate to imagine any other iconoclast of musical modernism being celebrated as energetically as Pierre Boulez is to mark his centenary year. But even amid fear and funding cuts, it remains impossible to imagine postwar classical music without him. There is, in theory, a Boulez for everyone: revelatory conductor, director of a major French research institute, rhetorical troublemaker – “blow up the opera houses,” he famously suggested – and, of course, composer of intricate, horizon-shifting scores.
Boulez’s own music was centre-stage for the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s latest total immersion day, the audience modest but passionate. (“To start, find 200 fanatics,” he once urged on the question of engaging people with new music.) The closing concert crackled abruptly into life, the first of his Deux Études – Musique Concrète for Tape griping and whirring from overhead speakers with the stage still empty. In the second, semi-recognisable pitches rush past in flurries, all attack and ending. More than 70 years since Boulez created them, such sounds remain refreshingly alien.
