“I could never conduct something I don’t like, I always choose titles from which I can obtain something. But as I could easily give up conducting for one year, I would never give up composing because, more than in the reinterpretation of what is already well known, it’s in the new writing that the most authentic and original part of me is reflected”. (Pierre Boulez)

Pierre Boulez, conductor, essayist and French composer of contemporary music, he is also a hard-fighter intellectual become with the passing of time a kind of critic consciousness of music vanguard.
At the centre of Boulez huge music reflection is Stéphane Mallarmé, a poet considered the Maestro of French symbolism, inspirer of the great music of our time.
Pli selon pli (Portrait de Mallarmé), for soprano and orchestra, the version of 1989, will be proposed to the audience of MITO this evening, on Thursday, September 22nd, at Conservatorio G. Verdi in Milan with Boulez conductor of Ensemble Intercontemporain and of the Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble. The first one has been founded in 1976 by Boulez himself with the aim of educating young musicians that, working in strict collaboration with composers, can explore new instrumental techniques and develop project that blend music, dance, movie, videos and visual arts. In 2004 Boulez also founded the Lucerne Festival Academy, where the Ensemble comes from, in order to initiate highly gifted young conductors from every part of the world into the mysteries of the métier.
Together with Boulez comes back to the Festival also the canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan.