Total Boulez

We went to a concert of the complete piano music of Pierre Boulez, performed in honor of his 90th birthday.  All the solo piano music was performed, along with Structures, Book 2.
This was really hard core stuff; two and a half hours of dense, dissonant piano music.   It was truly memorable, as performed by pianists Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich.

The most striking thing about the music of Boulez is the continuity; it is constantly transforming, abruptly shifting from moment to moment.  There are no long lasting regular pulses, and the music resists any of the familiar expressive tropes that we are used to.   Once you accept to enter into that realm, however, the music is consistently interesting and expressive.

Boulez speaks:

I wanted to eradicate from my vocabulary absolutely every trace of the conventional, whether it concerned figures and phrases, or development and form; I then wanted gradually, element after element, to win back the various stages of the compositional process, in such a manner that a perfectly new synthesis might arise, a synthesis that would not be corrupted from the very outset by foreign bodies—stylistic reminiscences in particular. 

   Highlights included the second piano sonata, written at the age of 23, when Boulez simultaneously emulates Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" sonata while at the same time wanting to destroy the sonata.    The program notes mention that Boulez was obsessed with Artaud's "theater of cruelty" at the time he wrote the piece.   Enough said.

The highlight of the program was a performance of "Structures, Book 2" for two pianos.  This piece, written in the late 50's, allows for considerable freedom of structure in performance, in that the two pianists can interact and chose different sections to perform.  Aimard and Stefanovich made the most of it; the performance was exciting, intense, and even witty at times.   Aimard, in particular,  throughout the concert brought the gestural aspects of the music out clearly.  Without exaggeration, he made the mercurial aspects of the music come through.

New definition of a metropolis:   A place where 400 people can show up on a Monday night for a concert of all Boulez piano music, and stay for the second half.

Although this is Boulez's 90th birthday year, and there are concerts in Europe marking the occasion, this would appear to be the only concert in New York that is doing so.

A page from Structures, Book 1:

No sign of Bjork.