Pierre Boulez was Olivier Messiaen’s student, and while his creative life followed a very different course, something very special happened whenever Boulez conducted Messiaen’s music in concert. That was certainly the case in Frankfurt in 1990, when Boulez directed the superb young players of the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie in the dazzling Chronochromie, and joined another supreme Messiaen interpreter – pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard – to perform Oiseaux Exotiques with his own Ensemble Intercontemporain. No one understood Messiaen’s music more profoundly than Boulez, and a documentary-style introduction from musicologist Michael Nupen sets the context for this uniquely authoritative celebration of two of France’s greatest postwar composers.
Pierre Boulez conducts Varèse
“I dream of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds,” said Edgard Varèse, and what better interpreter of his astonishing, genre-defying soundscapes than Pierre Boulez – arguably his spiritual successor, and perhaps the only figure in postwar French music whose sonic imagination matched Varèse’s own? In this 1990 concert from Frankfurt’s Alte Oper, Boulez conducts the youthful virtuosi of the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie in the shattering Amériques and directs Ensemble Intercontemporain in near-definitive accounts of Ionisation, Offrandes and Octandre. First, though, musicologist Michael Nupen offers an expert introduction to this most innovative of 20th-century musical minds.
Die Gespenstersonate
In September 1984, as part of the Berlin Festival Week, the Deutsche Oper Berlin staged the world premiere of German composer Aribert Reimann’s opera “Die Gespenstersonate”. Based on the drama by the Swedish writer August Strindberg, the chamber opera tells the story of a student, who muses about the inhabitants of a fancy-looking house. His crucial meeting with the Old Man pulls him into a world of intrigues, sickness, depression and murder. It plays in and around the presumably haunted house, which seems to drown its inhabitants in its sinister atmosphere. Better known for his operas “Lear” or “Medea”, Reimann established himself firmly as a stage composer from 1965 onwards. “Die Gespenstersonate”, being a modern chamber opera, was performed not on the great stage of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, but at the smaller Hebbel-Theater. Heinz Lukas-Kindermann’s stage direction sets the spectator under its gloomy spell, the exquisite cast performing the demanding score stars Hans Günter Nöcker as the “Old Man” and David Knutson as the Student, as well as well-loved Martha Mödl as the “Mummy”.