Posted on 03/26/2015 7:06:03 AM PDT by Borges
I still remember the day I met Pierre Boulez for the first time, more than twenty years ago. It was an unnerving prospect. This was after all the Chief Commissar of musical modernism, the man who believed that “one must liquidate the past to move forward”. He once declared that any composer who did not follow the new musical grammar invented by Arnold Schoenberg was “USELESS”, and suggested the world’s opera houses should be blown up. When he conducted his own music it was like watching a precise form of musical semaphore: a twitch of the left hand, an imperious sweep of the right, obediently followed by flying shards of notes from the watchful players. No emotion registered on that face.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Classical Ping
I linked to the wrong article. Hopefully it will get corrected quickly.
Unlistenable. Almost as bad as a Hillary cackle.
Ahhhhhhh.....the line between genius and crazy is a fine one, and this person has triple-jumped over into the crazy side.
His own music you mean? As a conductor he’s as good as any one alive.
It was a very different crowd from the usual Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts. I spotted Nicholas Slonimsky escorted by his beautiful red-haired great-granddaughter.
Boulez' recordings of Mahler are brisk and to the point.
He’s as good a conductor of 20th century music as there is. And for 19th century he’s simply only conducts what he likes. He told the NY Philharmonic that he hates Mendelsohn, Verdi, Tchaikovsky and Dvorak and will not conduct them.
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