Pierre Boulez

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There is nothing like a dogmatist. At the age of 86, Pierre Boulez is still arch-charioteer of the musical vanguard, as well as being the world's leading conductor. His compositions are a rigorous and dogmatically modern way of looking at sound. I like his chamber composition Répons in particular: it presents a definite idea of sound that is quite separate from what came before. While it may go too far, entering the realm of the unlistenable at times, it does so wholesale and coherently. The performance was recorded at IRCAM, the Institute he founded with a huge financial endowment from the French government, and it uses all the insights and research from that Institute.

Boulez does not step over the line - that would be too puny - instead he barges through and occupies his own territory, with a Gallic lack of interest in whether or not you come with him. He is not a wheedling modern-influenced composer, but a muscular modernist. The CD box even gives instructions on how to listen to it (with a stereo, not with headphones).

Boulez is a man of such force of opinion that it strains his face into deep lines. It was curious, then, that in the edition of Diapason magazine in which I saw this photograph of him he seemed washed out in the rain. In the first image, I have painted him in watercolour and washed it out. That runs contrary to his character. The second image, a quick line drawing, is more representative.

A recording of the first part of Répons