Newcomer and Master Music by Pierre Boulez
Paul Gr iff iths
The first half of this afternoon’s concert zooms us through three decades, from Pierre Boulez’s explosive beginnings as an artist to his full maturity—from the moment when, immediately after the Second World War, he was convinced Schoenberg’s serialism set the path ahead, to a time when spinning harmonies, serial only in spirit, were proposing a labyrinthine future, one made more of spirals than straight arrows. We begin at the beginning. At the time he wrote his Sonatine for flute and piano, Boulez was just 20 and starting out. Though a work of his had been broadcast the year before (Trois Psalmodies for piano), and though he was later to retrieve his intervening Notations, this Sonatine stood for decades as his Opus 1 and almost demands interpretation as the violent eruption of a new musical personality. Where it alludes to the past, it does so only to contradict. The medium is quintessentially that of an elegant French classicism from which Boulez distances himself as far as possible. And though the singlemovement form was prompted by the example of Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony (which Boulez had heard his teacher René Leibowitz conduct in December 1945, immediately before writing the Sonatine over the next two months), there is no imitation of the developmental style that made Schoenberg’s form possible: except in
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