Free Republic

I first played under the baton of Pierre Boulez more than a quarter of a century ago, shortly after I joined the Chicago Symphony. I always admired him as a human being. He was kind, brilliant, generous, and by all accounts a great and loyal friend. On more than one occasion he rescued the Chicago Symphony on short notice after other conductors had to cancel on us. Indeed, he and Bernard Haitink stepped in to steer the orchestra’s artistic fortunes following Daniel Barenboim’s abrupt departure in 2006. All of us in the orchestra are very much in his debt. But...

Deuxième Sonate Pour Piano (1947-48) Composed By - Pierre Boulez Piano - Paavali Jumppanen Recorded at Kuopio Music Centre, June & Juli 2004

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...

Pierre Boulez, who began his career as a radical modernist composer dedicated to overthrowing classical traditions and lived to become one of the most revered and sought-after orchestral conductors in the world, died Jan. 6 in Baden-Baden, Germany. He was 90. His family announced the death to the Philharmonie Paris but did not disclose a cause. Mr. Boulez (pronounced boo-LEZZ) came to public attention as the leading voice of postwar avant-garde music in France, an enfant terrible given to making public suggestions such as “the most elegant way of solving the opera problem would be to blow up the opera...