Proms 2024
26 Jul 2012, Royal Albert Hall
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Proms 2012 Prom 17: Beethoven & Boulez

Prom 17: Beethoven & Boulez
22:15 Thu 26 Jul 2012 Royal Albert Hall
François-Xavier Roth conducts Pierre Boulez's iconic Le marteau sans maître in a Late Night Prom with members of the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra.
François-Xavier Roth conducts Pierre Boulez's iconic Le marteau sans maître in a Late Night Prom with members of the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra.

Programme

Performers

About this event

After Beethoven’s Quintet for piano and winds, written soon after his arrival in Vienna, François-Xavier Roth directs Pierre Boulez's breakthrough piece, Le marteau sans maître (‘The Hammer without a Master’), arguably the single most influential composition of the 1950s. By interlocking settings of three poems by the Surrealist poet René Char with commentaries from specific sub-groups of its ensemble, Boulez established a new kind of rapport between text and music through unsuspected continuities of timbre – a labyrinth of exotic sound at once tightly organised and delirious.

There will be no interval

Unfortunately Pierre Boulez has had to withdraw from this Prom. We are grateful to François-Xavier Roth for appearing in his place.