It will be a homecoming of sorts for Mr. Boulez, who as Leonard Bernstein’s unlikely successor, directed the New York Philharmonic. He has been proving to New Yorkers ever since what they gave up.
He is the last great exponent of European modernism from the generation that emerged after the war. Born in Montbrison, in the Loire, the charmed and charming son of a wealthy factory engineer, a mathematics student turned musician, he attended the Paris Conservatory, where Olivier Messiaen helped introduce him to serialism. An agent provocateur for serial music before graduating and a master of hardball polemics, he caused even anxious luminaries like the aging Stravinsky to feel the need to earn his approval.
His Repons is lovely; Dialogue de L'Ombre Double for clarinet and electronics is a shorter, perhaps more accessible introduction to Boulez.
The Kennedy Center Players performed Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time last summer; it was among the best moments of musical delight I've had as an audience member.
With the deaths of Iannis Xenakis in 2001, Luciano Berio in 2003, György Ligeti in 2006 and Karlheinz Stockhausen in 2007, only a handful of lions like Boulez remain -- Steve Reich, George Crumb, Henryk Górecki, and Elliott Carter. Arvo Pärt and John Adams for the minimalists. Krzysztof Penderecki if you're truly serious.
All are significantly underrepresented among the Mozart, Brahms and Beethoven of contemporary performance houses.
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