Modern Masterworks: Edgar 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.

Soloist: 

Lyndon Brook (Narrator)

Ensembles: 

Ensemble Intercontemporain, Junge Deutsche Philharmonie

Conductor: 

Pierre Boulez