page_title: Pierre Boulez
section_title: 1992–2006: Return to conducting
hierarchical_section_title: Pierre Boulez / Biography / 1992–2006: Return to conducting
caption_attribution_description: Pierre Boulez durante una conferencia en el Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruselas (Bélgica), el 25 de octubre de 2004.
context_page_description: Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez CBE was a French composer, conductor, writer and founder of several musical institutions. He was one of the dominant figures of the post-war classical music world.
  Born in Montbrison in the Loire department of France, the son of an engineer, Boulez studied at the Conservatoire de Paris with Olivier Messiaen, and privately with Andrée Vaurabourg and René Leibowitz. He began his professional career in the late 1940s as music director of the Renaud-Barrault theatre company in Paris. As a young composer in the 1950s he quickly became a leading figure in avant-garde music, playing an important role in the development of integral serialism and controlled chance music. From the 1970s onwards he pioneered the electronic transformation of instrumental music in real time. His tendency to revise earlier compositions meant that his body of completed works was relatively small, but it included pieces regarded by many as landmarks of twentieth-century music, such as Le Marteau sans maître, Pli selon pli and Répons.
context_section_description: In 1992 Boulez gave up the directorship of IRCAM and was succeeded by Laurent Bayle. He was composer in residence at that year's Salzburg Festival.
  The previous year he began a series of annual residencies with the Cleveland Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 1995 he was named principal guest conductor in Chicago, only the third conductor to hold that position in the orchestra's history. He held the post until 2005, when he became conductor emeritus. His 70th birthday in 1995 was marked by a six-month retrospective tour with the London Symphony Orchestra, taking in Paris, Vienna, New York and Tokyo. In 2001 he conducted a major Bartók cycle with the Orchestre de Paris.
  This period also marked a return to the opera house, including two productions with Peter Stein: Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (1992, Welsh National Opera and Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris); and Schoenberg's Moses und Aron (1995, Dutch National Opera and Salzburg Festival). In 2004 and 2005 he returned to Bayreuth to conduct a controversial new production of Parsifal directed by Christoph Schlingensief.
  The two most substantial compositions from this period are ...explosante-fixe... (1993), which had its origins in 1972 as a tribute to Stravinsky and which again used the electronic resources of IRCAM, and sur Incises (1998), for which he was awarded the 2001 Grawemeyer Prize for composition.
  He continued to work on institutional organisation. He co-founded the Cité de la Musique, which opened in La Villette on the outskirts of Paris in 1995. Consisting of a modular concert hall, museum and mediatheque—with the Paris Conservatoire on an adjacent site—it became the home to the Ensemble Intercontemporain and attracted a diverse audience. In 2004, he co-founded the Lucerne Festival Academy, an orchestral institute for young musicians, dedicated to music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For the next ten years he spent the last three weeks of summer working with young composers and conducting concerts with the Academy's orchestra.
caption: Boulez at a conference at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, in 2004
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