Pierre Boulez was born in 1925 in Montbrison, Loire, France. He initially studied mathematics before deciding, at the age of 17, to devote himself entirely to music. After studying with Olivier Messiaen and René Leibowitz, who familiarized him with Schoenberg’s serial technique, Boulez began his composing career with Douze Notations (1945) and the First and Second Piano Sonatas (1946 and 1948). Above all it was the world première of his chamber cantata Le Marteau sans Maître in Baden-Baden (1955) which established his worldwide reputation. Boulez’s conducting career expanded during subsequent years. Highlights included his performances of Parsifal (1966–70) and the Ring (1976–80) at Bayreuth as well as his appointment as Music Director of the BBC Symphony Orchestra (1960–72) and the New York Philharmonic (1971–75). Between 1976 and 1991 he was active as director of IRCAM, the research institute for contemporary music that he founded at the Pompidou Center, and of the Ensemble intercontemporain in Paris. In the context of this work, using the expanded technologies it made available, Boulez formulated a new compositional style which is apparent in such works as Répons and Dialogue de l’Ombre double. Since the start of the 1990s, Boulez has once again focused increasingly on conducting, with engagements by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics, and the Staatskapelle Berlin, among others. At the Bayreuth Festival in 2004 and 2005, he again led Parsifal, and in 2007 he conducted Janáček’s House of the Dead at the Vienna Festival. In 2004 he founded the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ACADEMY, which he has led every summer since. Boulez has been awarded the Siemens Music Prize, the Praemium Imperiale, the Theodor W. Adorno Prize, the Polar Music Prize, the Kyoto Prize, and the Adenauer de Gaulle Prize.
LUCERNE FESTIVAL (IMF) debut on 4 September 1975 conducting the New York Philharmonic in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.
August 2011