Artist on artist: Michael Barenboim on ‘the inspirational’ Pierre Boulez

Michael Barenboim is a soloist and chamber musician on violin and viola who has performed under the baton of many of classical music’s biggest names including Asher Fisch with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Zubin Mehta with the Israel Philharmonic, Vasily Petrenko with the Berlin Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and his father Daniel Barenboim with the Vienna Philharmonic.

However, his breakthrough as an international soloist came with a performance of Schönberg’s Violin Concerto under the baton of Pierre Boulez in 2011. As a musician who places versatility and creativity at the forefront of his work, it is perhaps no surprise that Barenboim found, and continues to feel, a great admiration for the influential French composer and conductor, who passed away at age 90 in 2016.

As a composer Boulez was one of the dominant figures of post-war contemporary classical music; a leading figure in the avant-garde he played an important role in the development of integral serialism, controlled chance music, and the use of electronics in chamber and orchestral music. As a conductor – as well as leading performances of his own music and that of his contemporaries – he was recognised as being one of the finest interpreters of early 20th century music; that of Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky and Bartók among others.

Though Boulez may no longer be with us, his music and his legacy is kept alive by artists like Barenboim; both through his concert programmes – such as his October 2025 concert here in our Purcell Room – and through his enthusiasm, as will become all too apparent in the following conversation.

I met Boulez before I got to know his music. I can’t say exactly when I first encountered him – I met him through my father as they collaborated very closely – but I was still quite young. Only later did I get to know his music and his artistry. 

I always thought of him as one of the greatest conductors of his time. For the 50 or 60 years up until the point at which he stopped conducting, who was a greater interpreter of Stravinsky, of Ravel, of Debussy, or of Bartok, or of the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg? Who else can you think of that interprets a Mahler symphony with such excellence and with such clarity and with such understanding? I can’t think of anyone.

The greatest performance I ever heard of Mahler’s Symphony No.2 was with Boulez conducting. And the greatest performance I ever heard of Mahler’s Symphony No 4 was with Boulez. Perhaps you wouldn’t expect this of Boulez, because the music seems so emotional and so direct and so passionate, but at the same time he manages, through the way he conducts, to give the musicians a frame in which to express themselves to the fullest. He gives them this frame through his expert understanding of the music, because he approaches the score like the composer approaches the score.

There are several recordings of him conducting Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony, and they’re wildly different. You listen to them and one barely seems to have anything to do with the other, until you listen much more closely. I’m not sure how true this story is, but I’ve heard he was asked about this, about how and why these performances were so different. And his response was to say, ‘well, the musicians are different’. And of course that does make sense, that he would know how to encourage these musicians to play the same piece to their strengths.

When you start studying music, particularly the post-1945 musical landscape, you have to study Boulez, that’s just how it is. And so most musicians discover Boulez’ music through their studies, at least at first. But those studies often focus on his early works, from 1945 to the mid 1950s and Le Marteau sans maître. And that’s important, but it’s not the full story, because in his later writing his approach starts to change slightly. I think his approach to his own music is also affected and influenced through his conducting of the classic modern repertoire of the early 20th century and his conducting of Wagner and the German late romantic sound world. So I always want people to not get stuck on the first part of his biography, but to engage with his later work. Because artistically speaking, I don’t think it’s enough to look solely at, say, Structures I, as I don’t think that’s a full reflection of his music.

What’s important in his music is the variation between sections that are very strict and very rigid, and sections that are very free and quasi-improvised, and the contrast between them. Especially in his later music, where you have something of a back and forth between those elements. That’s something I learned from him for the interpretation of other music, to know when to be strict and metronomic, and when you have to be free – because it’s not about being free because you can, it’s because you have to; the music has to sound somewhat improvised. That’s something you learn, especially if you study his later pieces, that you can then apply to other music. 

Through a programme like the one I brought to the Southbank Centre in October 2025, I am contributing to keeping Boulez’ music played. The first piece was Anthèmes, a solo violin piece, which follows a kind of chapter, verse, chapter, verse structure, and each section has its own technical and musical idea. And the programme finished with Anthèmes II which expands on the earlier ideas of Anthèmes, with each section getting about 50 per cent longer, and adds live electronics, which gives something of a third dimension, so when something is played on the violin, you get five or six multipliers coming from different speakers.

I tried with that programme not to look at Boulez like we might look at an object in a museum, because that goes completely against his way of thinking, but instead to look at his music through the lens of different composers. So we had music from Benjamin Attahir who spent time with Boulez studying and learning from him, even though he writes in a very different style, and Philippe Manoury, who in many ways, especially his works for electronics, sounds as if he is following in Boulez’ footsteps, albeit whilst going in his own direction. And then there were two pieces of a different style that also have a different evocation; Kareem Roustom’s Pavane (pour les enfants defunts) in which he takes the title from Ravel and applies it in expression at his profound grief at the genocide taking place in Gaza. And before that, to bring us into that world, Layale Chaker’s Before bloom, which is based on the troubles during the Sheikh Jarrah evictions in occupied East Jerusalem in 2021.

‘With my programmes I try not to look at Boulez like we might look at an object in a museum, because that goes completely against his way of thinking. Instead I look at his music through the lens of different composers’

After my father, Boulez is definitely the person from whom I learned most about music. I was very fortunate to spend quite some time with him – I saw him conduct, I played with him, I worked with him on his music and on other music – and I tried to take as much as I could from those experiences, which meant learning from him as much as I could. Even just his outlook and his way of looking at the score. So when I played him something from the Schoenberg Concerto we performed together, he would break it down – ‘look at this part, look at the tempo, look how it’s written’ – and then you look, and you realise, well of course that’s how it is. He just had this way of making everything sound extremely simple.

I think that since his passing, we have lost a very important and inspirational voice in the world of classical music. There’s no one that has taken on that role, and I don’t see any other personality that will. For example, who goes to the Berliner Philharmonie and does the following programme? Webern, six pieces; Schoenberg, five pieces; Bartok, four pieces and Berg, three pieces. Only he would do that, especially as it leans a little into his sense of humor. No-one would programme this now, and no one would want to programme this now. But he did, and that meant that for three evenings in a row over 2,000 people heard this incredible programme conducted by this incredible master, and this doesn’t happen anymore. It was a great concert. Never heard anything like it again.

The one-time I played as a soloist for him as conductor was unforgettable. Just walking on stage and seeing him there was a moment of ‘wow, this is something’. Even when I played as concertmaster with him conducting, what struck me most, as stupid as it sounds, was the fact that he was right there. When I worked with him on Anthèmes it was quite an intense experience; playing it for the first time with him there, there was that sense of trepidation of ‘can I deliver this now the way it should be done?’ I’ve no idea how it went, but I remember feeling this big responsibility to play this piece in the right way.  

I don’t think fandom is necessarily the right word, but I will always be a huge admirer of him. Working with him as a soloist, in that dynamic, you have to know where you need to be free, where you have to take liberties, where the music demands a certain flexibility and where it doesn’t. And he would show this so amazingly, even in sections where it’s supposed to sound free, but it’s written quite detailed. He would give very clear signs, but do so in a way that made it sound as if you were playing freely. And he did that not only when you were playing as a soloist with him, but also when he was conducting a large orchestra.

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