It may seem peculiar to some listeners to find Pierre Boulez at the helm for this CSO Resound recording of Igor Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements, the Four Études, and Pulcinella, because it was the polystylism that these works represent which the conductor once vociferously railed against. But that was Boulez in his younger days, when he was still a fiery polemicist and a purist of the avant-garde, with an axe to grind against any who would not yield to the serial juggernaut, including the chameleon-like Stravinsky, ...
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It may seem peculiar to some listeners to find Pierre Boulez at the helm for this CSO Resound recording of Igor Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements, the Four Études, and Pulcinella, because it was the polystylism that these works represent which the conductor once vociferously railed against. But that was Boulez in his younger days, when he was still a fiery polemicist and a purist of the avant-garde, with an axe to grind against any who would not yield to the serial juggernaut, including the chameleon-like Stravinsky, who employed stylistic diversity as a major aspect of his art and resisted twelve-tone experimentation until his later years. Decades later, it seems Boulez has mellowed, for it is a fairly sympathetic interpreter who leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in these works, and it appears that the neo-Classicism of the symphony, the Rococo pastiches of Pulcinella, and the pseudo-primitivism of the Four Études no longer seem to cause him any aesthetic discomfort. It is even possible that...
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