News Story: Boulez Festival, Women at the Vanguard - Classical Music Magazine

News Story - Boulez Festival, Women at the Vanguard - Classical Music Magazine - Second July Issue 2011
350 Words

SouthBank Centre Celebrates 'The Godfather' of new music with exquisite labyrinth: The music of Pierre Boulez culmonating in Boulez conducting his seminal modernist masterpiece.
Friday 30 September – Sunday 2 October 2011

Mr Boulez has been modern music's most active voice and participant over the last 60 years. His compositions utilize a range of compositional styles, from twelve-tone technique, controlled chance and aleatoric music, to the use of electronics.

The festival, running from 30th September - 2nd October, offers an opportunity to witness each of Boulez's experimental facets through exciting collaborations from the the leading figures of today's contemporary music scene, and will include performances of his major works. Experts are also to deliver their insights in an in an International Study Day, which will take place at the Royal Festival Hall on 1st October.

The programme also boasts a high level of female performers - who are becoming increasingly prominent in contemporary music - including finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki, pianist Tamara Stefanovich and Finnish soprano Barbara Hannigan, who will undertake a fiendishly difficult vocal role in the climax of the programme, the work Pli Selon Pli.

On Friday 20th September, the Royal Academy of Music's Manson Ensemble will kick off the celebration with a selection of Boulez's acoustic works. The concert will feature Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna, alongside two versions of his Domaines. The works explore the notion of musical space as a solo clarinetist transforms the work's soundscape by moving about the stage, interacting with different musical groups.

On Saturday 1st October, leading Hungarian composer Péter Eötvös will conduct London Sinfonietta,flautist Micheal Cox and violinist Clio Gould in a collaboration with a sound engineer and computer music designer from IRCAM to perform the electronic works Explosante-fixe and Anthèmes 2 for violin & live electronicsare.

The will weekend culminate on Sunday 2nd October, when all of Boulez's piano works are to be performed in three short recitals over one afternoon by his friends Piere-Laurent and Tamara Stefanovich. And, as a grand finale, Boulez himself will be conducting soprano Barbara Hannigan, Ensemble intercontemporain (which he founded in 1976) and the young musicians of the Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble in his own seminal masterpiece, Pli selon pli (Fold by fold). The 70-minute work takes its inspiration and, more innovatively, its structure, from the poems of Stéphane Mallarmé.

Gillian Moore, Head of Contemporary Culture at Southbank Centre, describes the weekend as 'the perfect opportunity for curious audiences to discover and enjoy the vertiginous thrill of modernist music, brilliantly performed.’