Pierre Boulez at Eighty
November 12th, 2007 by Steve Bowbrick
Here we go: another one from the archives. The thing about Pierre Boulez is that he’s quite difficult to like - and his music is so prickly and deliberately inaccessible. But he’s got the magisterial Gallic charm thing going on. Oblique, Mercurial, uncompromising, obsessed. He’s kind of Napoleonic (Godardian?).
This hour long profile - which went out on Radio 3 a couple of years ago on his eightieth birthday - is really good value: lots of use is made of the Beeb’s exceptional access - all the top names are involved. The result is a portrait of the man but also of a fascinating and contradictory period in musical and intellectual history (MP3).
The pic is from the Wikimedia Commons.
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