Boulez Exploration

Snape Maltings, Aldeburgh
Snape Maltings Concert Hall,Snape,Suffolk,IP17 1SP
United Kingdom
+44 (0)1728 687110
http://www.aldeburgh.co.uk

11.30am – 1pm - Pierre Boulez: Livre pour quatuor (extracts) with Quatuor Diotima
3pm – 4.30pm - Pierre Boulez Piano Sonata No.3 with Florent Boffard, piano

We present a fascinating two-part insight into the music of one of Europe’s leading modernist figures. Famous for radically recomposing his early works, Boulez wrote his short piece for string orchestra Livre pour cordes in 1968, but the six short pieces for string quartet on which the work is based, Livre pour quatuor, were written much earlier, when he was in his early twenties. Utterly revolutionary for their time, the pieces were later withdrawn by Boulez in their quartet form, partly because of the extreme demands they make on the players, but provide a striking portrait of the artist as a young man – breathtakingly radical, yet apparently already at ease in a language that his elders and contemporaries were approaching with 15 great caution. The outstanding Quatuor Diotima play extracts of the pieces, while composer Julian Anderson introduces the work and facilitates a discussion.

In the afternoon we explore Boulez’s remarkable, labyrinthine third sonata, which he describes as an ‘investigation of a relative world, a permanent “discovering” rather like the state of “permanent revolution”’. Written in 1958, the work was inspired by the innovations in form made in literature by Mallarmé and Joyce, with its five movements (of which only two were ‘finished’) to be played in any order and with each containing its own blueprint for localised indeterminacy. Florent Boffard, long-time soloist in Boulez’s Ensemble InterContemporain, performs not only the two finished and printed movements, but also Boulez’s latest unfinished and unpublished complementary parts.


Pierre Boulez : Livre pour quatuor (extracts)
Pierre Boulez : Piano Sonata No.3