Pierre Boulez, the great conductor

Pierre Boulez was one of great orchestra conductors of modern times; he had an extraordinary ear and a high rhythmic precision, which permitted him to listen to the slightest mistakes. This led to interpretations where clarity often revealed a new perception of the work, be it classical or contemporary music. He never used a baton to conduct, just his two hands in a unique but precise style. His conduction was often criticized as being unemotional and cold, but this was the price to pay for precision and to create a unique sound equilibrium characteristic of his conducting. Indeed he was often producing startling new versions of existing works with a high level of precision based on what was actually written on the score, sometimes revealing a new vision of a well-known composition.

In 1966 he started to work closely with Wieland Wagner to conduct Richard Wagner’s works, starting with Parsifal and Tristan and Isolde in 1966 and 1967 and returning to conduct several times. In 1976, when Wolfgang Wagner was director of the Bayreuth Festival, he conducted the centenary production of The Ring of Nibelung with Patrice Chéreau, his interpretation was praised as one of the greatest Wagner productions, repeated over four years.

In 1965 he made his first retrospective as composer and conductor at the Edinburgh International Festival and started being guest conductor in many orchestras mainly in the United States; in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Cleveland. In 1971 he was appointed as Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and simultaneously at the New York Philharmonic succeeding here Leonard Bernstein. It was indeed and overwhelming task to conduct two such important orchestras, however he was committed to use this position to change the music making and the relation to the audience, even if this would take him away from his compositional work. His ambition was to enlarge repertoire and to open the audience to contemporary works while opening music to new audiences and proposing new forms of listening, like the “rug concerts” he organised in New York. He ended his appointment with the BBC in 1975 and with New York in 1977, moment in which he returned to France for new musical and institutional adventures.

In 1992 Pierre Boulez gave up directing IRCAM and went back to composing and conducting. He started a huge conducting career that took him all over the world with the most important orchestras and often the EIC following him in his tours. He continued conducting symphonic music while enlarging his musical interests to musical works other than XXth or XXIth century. He continued directing opera, mainly XXth century ones, including a new version of the Ring. In 2004 he co-founded the Lucerne Festival Academy, a summer campus dedicated to young musicians where works of the XXth and XXIth century for studied and performed in concerts. For the following ten years, he would assist for three weeks every end of August to the Festival, to work with young musicians and open their ears and minds to the performance of contemporary music.