Former New York Philharmonic Music Director Pierre Boulez to Be Honored in the Orchestra’s Upcoming Season

Former New York Philharmonic Music Director Pierre Boulez to Be Honored in the Orchestra’s Upcoming Season

Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen has designed a program celebrating the centennial of composer, conductor, innovator, and educator Boulez.

Pierre Boulez, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, contained multitudes. As an avowed iconoclast, he held controversial opinions about some of the most beloved composers of the classical canon. As a conductor—including as New York Philharmonic Music Director, 1971–77—he elevated the presence of early-20th-century modernists in the concert repertoire. As a composer, he was a leading figure of the avant-garde. As an innovator, he created IRCAM (Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique / musique), the Paris-based institute dedicated to research in cutting-edge and electro-acoustical art music, to foster experimentation in composition. As a visionary educator, he founded the prestigious Lucerne Festival Academy, helping to foster the next generation of music-makers.

This month Esa-Pekka Salonen — one of today’s preeminent composers and conductors, who was recently named the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Creative Director (beginning in the 2026–27 season), and the Philharmonie de Paris’s Creativity and Innovation Chair and the Orchestre de Paris’s Principal Conductor (both beginning in 2027–28) — is on the Philharmonic podium for back-to-back programs spotlighting Boulez’s music, part of a yearlong celebration of the late French master’s centennial. As a student at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy, Salonen idolized Boulez. Years later the two struck up a friendship that would last until Boulez’s death in 2016. The month before his appearances with the Orchestra, Salonen reflected on the programs and on the man and his legacy.

The October 3–5 concerts include several of Boulez’s solo-piano Notations, performed by pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Boulez’s former student. Originally composed in the 1940s as a series of 12 short pieces that call upon the twelve-tone techniques of the Second Viennese School, many of the Notations would assume a much larger dimension. As Salonen explains: “Decades later Boulez takes one of these pieces and expands it for massive orchestra. It’s amazing to see that the DNA of the piece doesn’t change and is able to produce that kind of monster.” The three performed in these concerts include No. 7, which, says Salonen, is Boulez “at his most Debussy-esque, full of very serious beauty and a lot of ripples on the surface of an otherwise calm sea.” (It’s no coincidence that three Debussy works also appear on the program; Boulez saw himself as occupying the same French tradition.) Boulez never completed his Notations project, but then, as Salonen recalls, “he never considered a work of his to be a closed unit. He felt the notion of a perfect, final work of art to be a very bourgeois, old-fashioned idea.”

The next week, October 9–11, Salonen conducts Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna, Boulez’s tribute to his mentor and fellow composer. “Maderna was like a father figure to Boulez,” Salonen says, “so when he passed away [in 1973] Boulez was devastated.” Perhaps because of this grief, Salonen believes, Boulez distanced himself from the emotional center of the piece, resulting in an unusually minimal role for the conductor: “In Rituel the conductor is more like a master of ceremonies, a priest.” Adding to this distance, Boulez divides the orchestra into eight groups, each playing independently of the others, with tempos set by percussionists rather than the conductor. Rounding out the program are works by Stravinsky and Bartók — another deliberate choice. “To put Boulez in this context is very natural. That was his home, and he has now been added to that canon.”

Consistent with Boulez’s view that his works are never complete, these performances of Rituel feature a novel production element: dance created by acclaimed French choreographer Benjamin Millepied, performed by L.A. Dance Project, which the Philharmonic co-commissioned with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and l’Orchestre de Paris. Salonen, who earlier this year conducted the project with these other two orchestras, declares: “I am sure Boulez would have been delighted. He loved when someone was trying to figure out something new about his music, an interpretive angle or a new context.”

Salonen is quick to note that Boulez’s multitudes — beyond composer, the role that takes center stage in the Philharmonic’s concerts this month — are “hard to compartmentalize because they were always interlinked.” He says that Boulez founded IRCAM, for instance, “to create a new type of art form combining all the elements he found important: science, philosophy, and music itself.” 

Further, Salonen notes, while Boulez articulated strict aesthetic ideas, as a friend he was “friendly, not arrogant, and quite funny,” a man whose opinions softened over time. “Towards the end of his life he became a lot more open and less categorical, more curious,” Salonen remembers. “He once told me over dinner of having heard Barenboim conduct a Brahms symphony. Knowing that Boulez had been quite dismissive of Brahms earlier in life, I asked, ‘How was the Brahms?’ He said, ‘It was quite wonderful.’”

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