Description
Deutsche Grammophon: Boulez Conducts Boulez — Le Marteau sans maître, Dérive 1 & 2 (Audio CD)
Brand new! Factory packaged! As pictured! Buy with confidence!
Product Details:
- UPC: 028947753278
- Catalog Number: 00289 477 5327
- Product Type: Audio CD
- Brand / Label: Deutsche Grammophon (20/21 series)
- Composer & Conductor: Pierre Boulez (1925–2016)
- Mezzo-soprano: Hilary Summers (Le Marteau sans maître)
- Ensemble: Ensemble Intercontemporain
- Release Year: 2005
- Genre: Classical
- Style: Contemporary, Modernist, Chamber
Product Features
- Format: CD
- Discs: 1
- Total runtime: 69:06
- Recording: DDD, digital stereo
- Made in: EU
- Condition: Brand new, factory sealed
Overview
Pierre Boulez conducts his own music, with the Ensemble Intercontemporain — the group he founded — playing three works that span the heart of his career. This is the composer as his own most authoritative interpreter.
Le Marteau sans maître (1953–55) is the centerpiece and one of the landmark scores of postwar modernism. Setting surrealist poems by René Char for alto voice and six instruments, it weaves the vocal line into a glittering, percussive ensemble of flute, viola, guitar, vibraphone, and percussion. Hilary Summers is the mezzo-soprano. The piece astonished its early listeners; Stravinsky praised it as the one truly significant work of its moment, and Ligeti later called it a defining composition of the 1950s.
The two Dérive pieces come from decades later. Dérive 1 (1984) is a concentrated five-minute jewel for six players; Dérive 2 (1988/2002), for eleven instruments, is a sprawling, intricate essay in rhythmic transformation. Together they show Boulez's mature voice — more fluid and gestural than the tightly serial Marteau, but no less rigorous.
For anyone exploring twentieth-century music, this is an essential document: definitive performances, conducted by the composer, on the label's dedicated contemporary-music series.
Interesting Facts
- Pierre Boulez (1925–2016) was one of the most influential figures in postwar music, equally important as composer, conductor, and theorist.
- He founded the Ensemble Intercontemporain in 1976 and IRCAM, the Paris research institute for music and acoustics, the same decade.
- Le Marteau sans maître sets poems by the French surrealist René Char and is scored for a distinctive sextet of flute, viola, guitar, vibraphone, xylorimba, and percussion.
- Stravinsky singled out the work as the only truly significant composition of its era, and Ligeti described it as a chief work of the 1950s.
- Dérive 2 exists in several versions; Boulez expanded and revised it over many years, with the form heard here dating from 2002.
- This release is part of Deutsche Grammophon's "20/21" series, devoted to music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Track Listing
1–9. Le Marteau sans maître (1953–1955), for alto voice and 6 instruments; poems by René Char — 38:32
- Dérive 1 (1984), for 6 instruments — 5:47
- Dérive 2 (1988/2002), for 11 instruments — 24:33
Publishers
℗ 2005 Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg — a Universal Music Company. Catalog 00289 477 5327. Made in the EU.
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