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His uncompromising commitment to modernism and the trenchant, polemical tone in which he expressed his views on music led some to criticise him as a dogmatist. In parallel with his activities as a composer Boulez became one of the most prominent conductors of his generation.
In a career lasting more than sixty years he held the positions of chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain and pricipal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Cleveland Orchestra. He made frequent guest appearances with many of the world's other great orchestras, including the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra. His work in the opera house included the Jahrhundertring—the production of Wagner's Ring cycle for the centenary of the Bayreuth Festival—and the world premiere of the three-act version of Alban Berg's Lulu.
His recorded legacy is extensive. Pierre Boulez died at his home in Baden-Baden on 5 January , aged He was the third of four children: The family prospered, moving in from the apartment above a pharmacy at 29 rue Tupinerie, where Boulez was born, to a comfortable detached house at 46 avenue d'Alsace-Lorraine, where he spent most of his childhood.
From the age of seven he went to school at the Institut Victor de Laprade, a Catholic seminary where the thirteen-hour school day was filled with study and prayer. By the age of fifteen he was sceptical about religion "what struck me most was that it was so mechanical: As a child he took piano lessons, played chamber music with local amateurs and sang in the school choir. After completing the first part of his baccalaureate a year early he spent the academic year of —41 at the Pensionnat St. Louis, a boarding school in nearby Saint-Etienne.
His father hoped this would lead to a career in engineering He was in Lyon when the Vichy government fell and the Germans took over.
Sonate pour violoncelle et piano, op. Retrieved 15 July From the s onwards he pioneered the electronic transformation of instrumental music in real time. Occasional releases provide a glimpse of the wealth of material they contain. History Before Le Marteau, Boulez had established a reputation as the composer of modernist and serialist works such as Structures I, Polyphonie X, as well as his infamously "unplayable" Second Piano Sonata Jameux b, Les fils de Bach. Member feedback about Dialogue de l'ombre double:
The city became a centre of the resistance and Boulez later recalled the terrible reprisals: It was not a gentle time, and nothing to eat, and terribly cold. Boulez was determined to pursue a career in music. The following year, with his sister's support in the face of opposition from his father, he studied the piano and harmony privately with Lionel de Pachmann son of the pianist Vladimir. Musical education In October he auditioned unsuccessfully for the advanced piano class at the Conservatoire, but he was admitted in January to the preparatory harmony class of Georges Dandelot.
His progress was so rapid that by May , Dandelot's report describes him as "the best of the class". He greatly enjoyed working with her and she remembered him as an exceptional student, using his exercises as models in advanced counterpoint until the end of her teaching career.
On 26 August , the day of de Gaulle's return to Paris, Boulez was among the crowd in the Place de la Concorde, which came under sniper fire from the few remaining Germans and collaborators.
In the autumn he joined Olivier Messiaen's advanced harmony class at the Conservatoire and attended the private seminars which Messiaen gave to chosen students, where key works of the early twentieth-century, including Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, were subjected to intensive analysis. In January Boulez moved to two small attic rooms at 4 rue Beautreillis in the Marais district of Paris, where he lived for the next fourteen years.
The piece was a revelation to him and he organised a group of fellow students to take private lessons with Leibowitz. It was here that he first studied twelve-tone technique and discovered the music of Webern.
Around this time he was one of a number of Conservatoire students organised, it was said, by Leibowitz who booed a performance of Stravinsky's Danses concertantes, a work whose neo-classicism represented the pre-war culture he was determined to reject. Eventually he also found Leibowitz's approach too doctrinaire and he broke angrily with him in when Leibowitz tried to criticise one of his early works. In June he was one of four Conservatoire students awarded premier prix, the only member of Messiaen's class to achieve this distinction.
He was described in the examiner's report as "the most gifted—a composer". He was so infuriated by what he described as her "lack of imagination" that he boycotted the class and organised a petition that Messiaen be given a full professorship in composition. It gives a different feeling of time. Early career in Paris Boulez earned money by giving mathematics lessons to his landlord's son. In early the actor and director Jean-Louis Barrault needed someone to play the instrument for a production of Hamlet for the new company he and his wife, Madeleine Renaud, had formed. He was soon appointed music director of the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault, a post he held for nine years.
He arranged and conducted incidental music, mostly by composers with whom he had little affinity such as Milhaud and Tchaikovsky , but it gave him the chance to work with professional musicians, whilst leaving him time to compose during the day. It also broadened his horizons: In the summer of Boulez encountered two writers who had a decisive impact on him: Around this time he met two composers who were to be important influences: John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. His friendship with Cage began in when Cage was visiting Paris. Cage introduced Boulez to two publishers Heugel and Amphion who agreed to take his recent pieces; Boulez helped to arrange a private performance of Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano.
When Cage returned to New York they began an intense, six-year correspondence about the future of music. In Stockhausen arrived in Paris to study with Messiaen. Although Boulez knew no German and Stockhausen no French, the rapport between them was instant: We talked about music all the time—in a way I've never talked about it with anyone else. As Alex Ross observed: Amid the confusion of postwar life, with so many truths discredited, his certitude was reassuring. As well as Stockhausen, Boulez was in contact there with other composers who would become significant figures in contemporary music, including Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, and Henri Pousseur.
According to Scott Burnham, the so-called Darmstadt School composers created a style that, for a time, existed as an antidote to music of nationalist fervour; an international style that couldnot be co-opted as propaganda in the way that the Nazis had used, for example, the music of Beethoven. In May Boulez gave the first public performance of Structure 1a for two pianos with Olivier Messiaen. He stayed at Cage's apartment but their friendship was already cooling as he could not accept Cage's increasing commitment to compositional procedures based on chance and he later broke off contact with him.
The Domaine Musical In , with the financial backing of Barrault and Renaud, he started a series of concerts at the Petit Marigny theatre. They became known as the Domaine Musical. The concerts focused initially on three areas: Boulez proved an energetic and accomplished administrator, taking charge of everything from hiring instruments to managing subscriptions and arranging accommodation for artists.
The theatre was small, the wooden seats hard and the programmes inordinately long, yet the concerts were an immediate success. The composer Francis Poulenc observed: Crowds of young people cram in together for standing room. Boulez remained director until , when Gilbert Amy succeeded him. When he conducted the work in Los Angeles in early , Stravinsky—who described it as "one of the few significant works of the post-war period of exploration"—attended the performance.
Boulez dined several times with the Stravinskys and according to Robert Craft "soon captivated the older composer with new musical ideas, and an extraordinary intelligence, quickness and humour". Relations soured somewhat the following year over the first Paris performance of Stravinsky's Threni for the Domaine Musical.
Poorly planned by Boulez and nervously conducted by Stravinsky, the performance broke down more than once. According to Glock, who sat between Stravinsky and Boulez at dinner afterwards, "the atmosphere was electric with discontent. It received its premiere in Donaueschingen in October Around this time Boulez's relations with Stockhausen grew increasingly tense as according to the biographer, Joan Peyser he saw the younger man supplanting him as the leader of the avant-garde. Robert Piencikowski suggests a number of reasons for the move to Germany: During this period he turned increasingly to conducting.
His first engagement as an orchestral conductor had been in , when he conducted the Venezuelan Symphony Orchestra whilst on tour with the Renaud-Barrault company. In Cologne he conducted his own Le Visage nuptial in and—with Bruno Maderna and the composer—the first performances of Stockhausen's Gruppen in The conditions were exceptional, with thirty orchestral rehearsals instead of the usual three or four and the critical response was unanimously favourable.
Wieland had already invited him to conduct Wagner's Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival later in the season and he returned to conduct revivals in , and He also conducted performances of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde with the Bayreuth company at the Osaka Festival in Japan in , but the lack of adequate rehearsal made it an experience he later said he would rather forget. In the Edinburgh International Festival staged the first full-scale retrospective of Boulez as composer and conductor. Boulez expressed his fury in an article in the Nouvel Observateur: It received its premiere in Donaueschingen in October Around this time Boulez's relations with Stockhausen grew increasingly tense as according to Peyser he saw the younger man supplanting him as the leader of the avant-garde.
During this period he turned increasingly to conducting. His first engagement as an orchestral conductor had been in , when he conducted the Venezuelan Symphony Orchestra whilst on tour with the Renaud-Barrault company. The conditions were exceptional, with thirty orchestral rehearsals instead of the usual three or four and the critical response was unanimously favourable.
In the Edinburgh International Festival staged the first full-scale retrospective of Boulez as composer and conductor. Apart from Pli selon pli , the only substantial new work to emerge in the first half of the s was the final version of Book 2 of his Structures for two pianos.
Boulez first conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in February , in an unlikely place—the seaside resort of Worthing—and in some unlikely repertoire, accompanying Vladimir Ashkenazy in a Chopin piano concerto "It was terrible, I felt like a waiter who keeps dropping the plates". Two months later Boulez conducted the New York Philharmonic for the first time. Glock was dismayed and tried to persuade him that accepting the New York position would detract both from his work in London and his ability to compose but Boulez could not resist the opportunity as Glock put it "to reform the music-making of both these world cities" and in June the New York appointment was confirmed.
His tenure in New York lasted between and and was not an unqualified success. The dependence on a subscription audience limited his programming. He introduced more key works from the first half of the twentieth-century and, with earlier repertoire, sought out less well-known pieces: The players admired his musicianship but came to regard him as dry and unemotional by comparison with Bernstein, although it was widely accepted that he improved the standard of playing.
With the resources of the BBC behind him he could be more uncompromising in his choice of repertoire. He conducted works by the younger generation of British composers—such as Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies—but Britten and Tippett were absent from his programmes. In both cities he sought out venues where music could be presented more informally: His aim was "to create a feeling that we are all, audience, players and myself, taking part in an act of exploration. Highly controversial in its first year, by its final year in it was praised as one of the great Wagner productions.
It was televised around the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, few new works emerged during this period: Cummings ist der Dichter was first performed in Stuttgart in September ; an early realisation of In Boulez was asked by President Pompidou to return to France and set up an institute specializing in musical research and creation at the arts complex—now known as the Centre Georges Pompidou—which was planned for the Beaubourg district of Paris. Boulez had in mind as a model the Bauhaus, which had provided a meeting place for artists and scientists of all disciplines.
Boulez wrote a series of pieces which used the potential developed at IRCAM electronically to transform sound in real time. He also revised earlier works: The majority of his appearances during this period were with his own Ensemble Intercontemporain—including tours to the United States , Australia , the Soviet Union and Canada —although he also renewed his links in the s with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.
He was succeeded by Laurent Bayle. The previous year he began a series of annual residencies with the Cleveland Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In he was named Principal Guest Conductor in Chicago, only the third conductor to hold that position in the orchestra's history.
He held the post until , when he became Conductor Emeritus. This period also marked a return to the opera house. He worked with Peter Stein on two productions: He continued to involve himself closely in institutional organisation. He left a number of compositional projects unfinished, including the remaining Notations for orchestra.
He remained active as a conductor over the next six years. His appearances became more infrequent after an eye operation in left him with severely impaired sight. Other health problems included a shoulder injury resulting from a fall. Later in he worked with the Diotima Quartet, making final revisions to his only string quartet, Livre pour quatuor , begun in Complete Works , a survey of all his authorised compositions.
He remained Director of the Lucerne Festival Academy until , but his health prevented him from taking part in the many celebrations held across the world for his 90th birthday in He died on 5 January at his home in Baden-Baden. At a memorial service the next day at the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, eulogists included Daniel Barenboim , Renzo Piano, and Laurent Bayle, president of the Philharmonie de Paris, [] whose large concert hall had been inaugurated the previous year, thanks in no small measure to Boulez's influence.
Boulez's earliest surviving compositions date from his school days in —43, mostly songs on texts by Baudelaire, Gautier and Rilke. The Onze notations were an early attempt to orchestrate eleven of the Douze notations pour piano In the mids Boulez embarked on a second, more radical transformation of these short piano pieces into extended works for large orchestra, [] a project which pre-occupied him to the end of his life, nearly seventy years after the original composition.
This is only the most extreme example of a lifelong tendency to revisit earlier works: What are needed, surely, are essential statements, singular and unique works. And these he has provided, without question. He explored modes of articulation between song and speech, as well as quarter-tones. Forty years later Boulez arrived at the definitive version for soprano, mezzo-soprano, chorus and orchestra — It went though three further versions before reaching its final form in as a piece for soprano, mixed chorus and orchestra.
The Second Piano Sonata —48 is a half-hour work of extreme virtuosity. Its four movements follow the standard pattern of a classical sonata but in each of them Boulez subverts the traditional model. Of the two middle movements Boulez said: That revolution entered its most extreme phase in —52, when Boulez developed a technique in which not only pitch but other musical parameters—duration, dynamics, timbre and attack—were organised according to serial principles, an approach known as total serialism or punctualism. In the early s Boulez began to apply the technique rigorously, ordering each parameter into sets of twelve and prescribing no repetition until all twelve had sounded.
Had computers existed at that time I would have put the data through them and made the piece that way. But I did it by hand It was a demonstration through the absurd. But for me it was an experiment that was absolutely necessary. Structures, Book I was a turning point for Boulez. Recognising a lack of expressive flexibility in the language described in his essay "At the Limit of Fertile Land Its material was reused in the composition Cummings ist der Dichter.
According to Hopkins and Griffiths the music is characterised by abrupt tempo transitions, passages of broadly improvisatory melodic style and exotic instrumental colouring. Boulez said that the choice of these instruments showed the influence of non-European cultures, to which he had always been attracted. Three Improvisations —of increasing complexity—on individual sonnets are framed by two orchestral movements, into which fragments of other poems are embedded. Boulez described its sound-world, rich in percussion, as "not so much frozen as extraordinarily 'vitrified ' ".
While in Cage's music the performers are often given the freedom to create completely unforeseen sounds, with the object of removing the composer's intention from the music, in Boulez's music they may only choose between possibilities that have been written out in detail by the composer.
This method, when applied to the successional order of sections, is often described as "mobile form", a technique innovated by the composer Earle Brown and inspired by the mobile sculptures of Alexander Calder, [] to whom Brown and Cage introduced Boulez when he was visiting New York in Boulez employed variants of the technique in a number of works over the next two decades: Cummings —the conductor is given choice as to the order of certain events but there is no freedom for the individual player.
In its original version Pli selon pli also contained elements of choice for the instrumentalists, but much of this was eliminated in later revisions. By contrast Figures—Doubles—Prismes —68 is a fixed work with no chance element. Robert Piencikowski describes it as "a great cycle of variations whose components interpenetrate each other instead of remaining isolated in the traditional manner. Boulez later acknowledged that "this arrangement is bound up with the idea of stereophony, which was new at the time: He sees this shift reflected in Boulez's writings from the period in which he senses a great concern for the audience, for the way his works are to be perceived, not only the way they are conceived and constructed.
The contents are not I think in my recent work it is true that the first approach is more direct, and the gesture is more obvious, let's say. For Goldman Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna —75 marks the beginning of this development. Boulez wrote this twenty-five minute work as an epitaph for his friend and colleague, the Italian composer and conductor, who died of cancer in at the age of The piece is divided into fifteen sections, the orchestra into eight groups.
Whilst the odd-numbered sections are conducted, in the even sections the conductor merely sets each group in motion and its progress is regulated by a percussionist beating time. In his dedication, Boulez described the work as "a sort of verse and response for an imaginary ceremony … ceremony of memory … ceremony of extinction, ritual of disappearance and survival.
Messagesquisse is a short, ebullient work for solo cello and six other cellos, based on a formula derived from the name of Paul Sacher, its dedicatee. Notations I—IV are the first four transformations of piano miniatures from into pieces for very large orchestra.
In his review of the New York premiere, Andrew Porter wrote that the single idea of each original piece "has, as it were, been passed through a many-faceted bright prism and broken into a thousand linked, lapped, sparkling fragments", the finale "a terse modern Rite … which sets the pulses racing. The material is derived from six chords and, according to Ivan Hewett, the piece "shuffles and decorates these chords, bursting outwards in spirals and eddies, before returning to its starting point". At the end the music "shivers into silence.
Boulez likened the experience of listening to pre-recorded electronic music in the concert hall to a crematorium ceremony. His real interest lay in the instantaneous transformation of live instrumental sounds but the technology did not become available until the late s and the founding of IRCAM. Between and he worked on …explosante-fixe… , an extended chamber piece for eight solo instruments, electronically transformed by a machine called a halophone, which effected a degree of continuity between different instrumental timbres and made the sounds travel around the concert hall.
In this forty-minute work an instrumental ensemble is placed in the middle of the hall, while six soloists encircle the audience: It is their music which is transformed electronically and projected through the space. Peter Heyworth described the moment at which they enter, some ten minutes into the piece: Even more impressive is the fact that there is no longer a schism between the worlds of natural and electronic sounds, but rather a continuous spectrum.
Lasting around eighteen minutes, it is a dialogue between a solo clarinet played live, though sometimes reverberated through an offstage piano and its double in passages pre-recorded by the same musician and projected around the hall. Boulez acknowledged that the work had a theatrical aspect, indeed its title refers to a scene in Paul Claudel's play Le Soulier de satin. The piece now known as …explosante-fixe… , and recorded commercially, was composed for MIDI-flute and two accompanying flutes with ensemble and live electronics at IRCAM between and By this time the technology was such that the computer could follow the score and respond to triggers from the players.
Although this gives rise to effects of speed and complexity which no violinist could achieve, Boulez restricts the palette of electronic sounds so that their source, the violin, is always recognisable. The piece falls into six sections, the last of which is longer than the preceding five combined. In three further late works Boulez relinquished electronics, although Paul Griffiths suggests that in sur Incises —98 the choice of like but distinct instruments, widely spread across the platform, allowed Boulez to create effects of harmonic, timbral and spatial echo for which he had previously needed electronic means.
The piece is scored for three pianos, three harps and three percussionists including steel drums and grew out of Incises — , a short piece written for use in a piano competition. Notation VII , marked "hieratic" in the score, is the longest of the completed orchestral Notations. Derive 2 began life in as a five-minute work dedicated to Elliott Carter on his 80th birthday; by it was a minute work for eleven instruments and Boulez's last major work.
A distinction may be made between works which Boulez was actively progressing and those which he put to one side despite their potential for further development. As for works Boulez was known to be working on in his later years, the premieres of two more orchestral Notations V and VI were announced by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for May but later postponed.
As a young man Boulez was an explosive, often confrontational figure. Jean-Louis Barrault, who knew him in his twenties, caught the contradictions in his personality: The hostility of the establishment to what you were able to do in the Forties and Fifties was very strong. Sometimes you have to fight against your society. When, in , Henri Dutilleux , who was only a few years older than Boulez, presented his First Symphony, Boulez greeted him by turning his back. Indeed, he has often seemed to enjoy expressing his contempt for other musicians who do not share his musical views. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch.
On the other hand, those who knew him well often referred to his loyalty, both to individuals and to organisations. Boulez read widely and identified Proust, Joyce, Kafka and Musil as particular influences, as well as Paul Claudel, whom he knew from his days with the Barrault-Renaud company. In its obituary, The New York Times reported that "about his private life he remained tightly guarded" and that apart from his older sister, Jeanne, "few others were able to break through his reserve. Aside from this his personal life remained almost entirely invisible. Boulez was one of the leading conductors of the second half of the twentieth century.
In a career lasting more than sixty years he directed most of the world's major orchestras. Boulez gave various reasons for conducting as much as he did. He gave his first concerts for the Domaine Musical because its financial resources were limited: The French litterateur and musicologist Pierre Souvchinsky disagreed: Not everyone agreed about the greatness of that gift. For the conductor Otto Klemperer he was "without doubt the only man of his generation who is an outstanding conductor and musician. It's as simple as that That's why he conducts Bach, Beethoven or Webern in exactly the same way.
His repertoire expanded and contracted in the different phases of his career: Of earlier repertoire only Mozart, Berlioz and Wagner remained a consistent presence. He worked with many leading soloists and had particularly long-term collaborations with Daniel Barenboim and Jessye Norman. According to Peter Heyworth Boulez produced a lean, athletic sound which, underpinned by his rhythmic exactitude, could generate an electric sense of excitement.
The ability to reveal the structure of a score and to clarify dense orchestral textures were hallmarks of his conducting. He conducted without a baton, indicating time with the forefinger and thumb of his right hand and—in legato music—making sweeping, karate-like gestures with the fingers of that hand pressed together. Meanwhile, the left hand, which rarely imitated the right, was used more sparingly to indicate dynamics. When asked about the audience, Boulez said: Boulez also conducted in the opera house. His chosen repertoire was small and included no Italian opera.
Apart from Wagner, he conducted only twentieth-century works. Things might have been different had his attempts to find a long-term collaborator, and to reform operatic institutions, not been consistently frustrated. When the Frankfurt Wozzeck was revived after Wieland's death Boulez was deeply disillusioned by the working conditions: The cynicism of the way an opera house like that was run disgusted me. It still disgusts me. In the event Boulez conducted only specific projects—often in landmark productions by leading stage directors—when he could be satisfied that conditions were right.
Thanks to his years with the Barrault company, the theatrical dimension was as important to him as the musical and he always attended staging rehearsals. Peter Stein initially agreed but withdrew in He treated the story in part as an allegory of capitalism, drawing on ideas that George Bernard Shaw explored in The Perfect Wagnerite in Boulez's conducting was no less controversial, emphasising continuity, flexibility and transparency over mythic grandeur and weight. His other preferred director was Peter Stein.
From the mids Boulez spoke of composing an opera himself. His attempts to find a librettist were unsuccessful: Boulez's first recordings date from his time with the Domaine Musical in the late s and early s and were made for the French Vega label. In Universal Music brought together the recordings from this period in a CD set. Between and he recorded for Columbia Records later Sony Classical.
The LSO also contributed to the Webern edition which Boulez supervised, consisting of all the works with opus numbers. A particular focus of the Columbia years was a wide-ranging survey of the music of Schoenberg, including Gurrelieder , Moses und Aron , Erwartung and Pierrot lunaire , but also less well-known works such as Die Jakobsleiter and the unaccompanied choral music. Three operatic projects from this period were picked up by other labels: In the s he also recorded for the Erato label, mostly with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, with a greater emphasis on the music of his contemporaries Berio, Ligeti, Carter etc.
There was a Stravinsky cycle—including his only recording of the complete The Soldier's Tale —as well as a survey of some of his own music, including a second recording of Pli selon pli with Phyllis Bryn-Julson as soloist and recordings of Le Visage nuptial , Le Soleil des eaux and Figures—Doubles—Prismes. From onwards Boulez recorded under an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon. Composers new to his discography included Richard Strauss, Szymanowski and Anton Bruckner —his recording of the Eighth Symphony met with particular acclaim.
Coupled with Berg's Lulu-Suite , it was his final recording. DVDs of two opera productions are also available on DG: In addition, many hundreds of concerts conducted by Boulez are held in the archives of radio stations and orchestras. Occasional releases provide a glimpse of the wealth of material they contain. From time to time in the early part of his career Boulez performed publicly as a pianist, usually as part of a mixed programme in which he also conducted orchestral or instrumental music. In he accompanied the tenor Jean Giraudeau in a recording of songs by Stravinsky and Mussorgsky.
According to Jean-Jacques Nattiez Boulez was one of the two twentieth-century composers who wrote most prolifically about music, the other being Schoenberg. Jonathan Goldman points out that, over the decades, Boulez's writings addressed very different readerships: Generally Boulez avoided publishing detailed analyses, other than one of Le sacre du printemps. As Nattiez points out: This may sometimes prove disappointing to composition students, but it is no doubt a peculiarity of his writing that explains its popularity with non-musicians.
Boulez taught at Darmstadt most years between and He was professor of composition at the Musik Akademie Basel in Switzerland and a visiting lecturer at Harvard University in He also taught privately in the early part of his career. An article published for Boulez's 80th birthday in the Guardian revealed that Boulez's fellow-composers had divided, and sometimes equivocal, views about him. According to George Benjamin "[Boulez] has produced a catalogue of wondrously luminous and scintillating works.
Within them a rigorous compositional skill is coupled to an imagination of extraordinary aural refinement".