PIANO RECITAL
IAN PACE

Pierre Boulez
2nd Sonata
Notations extracts (nos 7 and 9)

André Jolivet
'La Princesse de Bali'
‘Beaujolais’ from his suite Mana.

IAN PACE is a pianist of long-established reputation, specialising in the farthest reaches of musical modernism and transcendental virtuosity, as well as a writer and musicologist focusing on issues of performance, music and society and the avant-garde. He was born in Hartlepool, England in 1968, and studied at Chetham's School of Music, The Queen's College, Oxford and, as a Fulbright Scholar, at the Juilliard School in New York, later completing his PhD, on the origins of post-war German new music and its infrastructure under occupation, at Cardiff University. His main piano teacher, and a major influence upon his work, was the Hungarian pianist György Sándor, a student of Bartók.

Based in London since 1993, he has pursued an active international career, performing in 24 countries and at most major European venues and festivals. His absolutely vast repertoire of all periods focuses particularly upon music of the 20th and 21st Century. He has given world premieres of over 300 piano works, including works by Patrícia de Almeida, Gilbert Amy, Julian Anderson, Richard Barrett, Konrad Boehmer, Luc Brewaeys, James Dillon, Pascal Dusapin, Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy (whose complete piano works he performed in a landmark 6-concert series in 1996, and then again in an 11-concert series in 2016-17), Christopher Fox, Sam Hayden, Volker Heyn, André Laporte, Hilda Paredes, Horatiu Radulescu, Frederic Rzewski, Gerhard Stäbler, Yuji Takahashi, Hermann Vogt and Walter Zimmermann. He has presented cycles of works including Stockhausen's Klavierstücke I-X, and the piano works of Ferneyhough, Fox, Kagel, Ligeti, Lachenmann, Messiaen, Radulescu, Rihm, Rzewski and Skempton, and also of the nine symphonies of Beethoven as transcribed for piano by Liszt. He has played with orchestras including the Orchestre de Paris under Christoph Eschenbach (with whom he premiered and recorded Dusapin’s piano concerto À Quia), the SWF Orchestra in Stuttgart under Rupert Huber, and the Dortmund Philharmonic under Bernhard Kontarsky (with whom he gave a series of very well-received performances of Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand). He has recorded over 40 CDs; his recording of Michael Finnissy's five-and-a-half hour The History of Photography in Sound (of which he gave the world premiere in London in 2001) was released by Divine Art in October 2013 to rave reviews. Recent recordings have included piano music of Marc Yeats, the complete piano works of Sam Hayden, Brian Ferneyhough and Horatiu Radulescu, and new recordings of Michael Finnissy and Volker Heyn. Recent concerts have included appearances in Paris, Lisbon, Zürich, at the Ruhrtriennale in Duisburg, Oslo, Prague, Kiev, São Paolo, and around the UK. In 2018, BBC Radio 3 broadcast a special two-hour issue of the programme Here and Now devoted to his work, the first time this had been done for a single artist.

He is Professor of Music, Culture and Society at City University, London, and University Advisor – Interdisciplinarity, and was Head of the Department of Music from 2020 to 2021. He previously held positions at the London College of Music and Media, University of Southampton, Trinity Laban Conservatoire and Dartington College of Arts. His areas of academic expertise include the breadth of 19th, 20th and 21st century art music, 19th century performance practice (especially the work of Liszt and Brahms), musical historiography, contemporary performance practice and issues, music and culture under fascism and communism, the post-1945 avant-garde, in particular in West Germany issues of music and society (with particular reference to the work of Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School, and their followers), critical musicology, and music education at secondary and tertiary levels. He co-edited and was a major contributor the volume Uncommon Ground: The Music of Michael Finnissy, which was published by Ashgate in 1998, and authored the monograph Michael Finnissy’s The History of Photography in Sound: A Study of Sources, Techniques and Interpretation, published by Divine Art in 2013. He is currently writing a new biography of Karlheinz Stockhausen for Reaktion Books. He has co-edited three further books, and published articles in leading academic journals, as well as writing for a wider audience in the Telegraph, the Spectator, London Review of Books, Times Higher Education Supplement, The Critic, The Conversation, International Piano and Music Teacher, as well as making a series of podcasts.

He also worked with the director Bettina Ehrhardt on the film Wir fangen ganz von vorn an: Neue Musik für ein Deutschland nach dem Krieg (2020). He is also a twice-elected trustee of the Society for Music Analysis, for which he is current Awards Officer. He is also co-convenor of City Academics for Academic Freedom, and a founder member of the London Universities’ Council for Academic Freedom, for which he acts as Secretary.

He is also a composer; recent works include Das hat Rrrrasss… for speaker and piano (2018); the piano pieces Thirty for Grace (2019), Clothcomposers (2019) and Schneeriss (2020); the cycle for singer and ensemble Matière: Le palais de la mort (2021); and Lancashire Rock (2022) for clarinet, percussion and piano.

CAROLINE POTTER
is Visiting Reader in French Music at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. With Boydell she published Erik Satie: A Parisian Composer and his World (2016) which was named SUNDAY TIMES CLASSICAL MUISC BOOK OF THE YEAR  
for SATIE
published by

The Boydell Press

Organised Delirium

by Caroline Potter

on Boulez’s formative years
published by

The Boydell Press

Exploring the emotional and cultural influences on Pierre Boulez's early works as well as the role
surrealism and French culture of the 1930s and 40s played in shaping his radical new musical concepts.

Pierre Boulez's (1925-2016) creative output has mostly been studied from an analytical perspective in the context of serialism. While Boulez tends to be pigeonholed as a cerebral composer, his interest in structure coexisted with extreme visceral energy. This book redresses the balance and stresses the febrile cultural environment of Paris in the 1940s and the emotional side of his early works.

Surrealism, in particular, had an impact on Boulez's formative years that has until now been underexplored. There are intriguing links between French music and surrealism in the 1930s and 40s, arising within a cultural context where surrealism, ethnography and the emerging discipline of ethnomusicology were closely related. Potter situates the young Boulez within this environment. As an emerging musician, he explored radical new musical concepts alongside peers including Yvette Grimaud, Serge Nigg and Yvonne Loriod, performing and exchanging ideas with them.

This book argues that authors associated with surrealism, especially René Char but also Antonin Artaud and André Breton, were crucial to Boulez's musical development. It enhances our understanding of his work by connecting it with significant trends in contemporary French culture, refocusing Boulez studies away from detailed musical analysis and towards a broader and more visceral, emotional response to his work.