PIERRE BOULEZ - BOULEZ THE CONDUCTOR: COMPLETE RECORDINGS ON DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON AND PHILIPS

DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON

£183.60

Format: 84CD+4BR
Catalogue No.: 4860915
Barcode: 0028948609154
Release Date: 28 Jan 2022
Genre: Classical

During the 1950s, the influence of Boulez’s musical thinking was felt most powerfully in the context of the international summer courses for new music in Darmstadt in Germany, at which the leading currents in contemporary music were explored and developed. At the beginning of the 1960s he also taught at the Basel Academy of Music, but conducting soon became his principal activity. He made his Bayreuth debut in 1966 with a landmark account of Parsifal, returning to conduct the same work in the following two seasons, and in 1970, when it was recorded by DG. He was engaged at Bayreuth again in 1976, for the centenary production of The Ring, in Patrice Chéreau’s epoch-making staging, which was filmed in 1980 and released on DVD by DG in 2005. In 1979 he conducted the world premiere of the completed version of Berg’s Lulu at the Paris Opéra, and the DG recording made at IRCAM in conjunction with the production won a Gramophone Award that same year.
In 1989 Boulez signed a recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon, becoming an exclusive artist on the yellow label in 1992. During the 1980s and 1990s he made extensive recordings of the music of Ravel (with the Berliner Philharmoniker), Debussy (with the Cleveland Orchestra), Stravinsky and Bartók. The Welsh National Opera production of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande directed by Peter Stein that Boulez conducted in 1992 was filmed and released on DG, and his disc of the Ravel piano concertos played by Krystian Zimerman won a Gramophone award in 1999. In 1995 he was named Gramophone’s “Artist of the Year”, and in the same year, on the occasion of his 70th birthday, he was honoured by the French “Victoires de la musique classique”.
Five years later, as well as undertaking an extensive concert series to mark his 75th birthday, he also made new recordings for DG of his own music, including the avant-garde classics Pli selon pli and Le Marteau sans maître. The recording of Répons was awarded a Grammy that year; the disc of Anthèmes 2, Messagesquisse and Sur Incises won a Gramophone Award in 2001; and in 2005, his DG Le Marteau sans maître earned him yet another Grammy – his 26th. At the 2015 Grammy awards in February, he was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
It was a measure of Boulez’s openness to change that his thinking on music in general and on particular works and composers evolved over time. These developments were captured in many DG discs, with accounts of the Mahler symphonies and orchestral songs, Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony (with the Wiener Philharmoniker), and, to mark his 85th birthday, a CD of Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto and Third Symphony (“Song of the Night”) and a second version of the Ravel piano concertos (on this occasion with Pierre-Laurent Aimard). At the same time, he continued to record 20th-century classics, by Varèse, Ligeti, Messiaen and himself.