French conductor, composer and writer Pierre Boulez was a giant of classical music throughout the second half of the 20th century and until his death in 2016 aged 90. He won more than 30 Grammy Awards for his recordings of his own compositions and of composers such as Bartók, Berlioz, Debussy, Mahler, Ravel, Stravinsky and Wagner and in 2015 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award. He won ten Gramophone Awards as a conductor and four as a composer and in 1995 the magazine honoured him as Artist of the Year.
Born in France in a town just west of Lyon, he studied in Paris where in the late 1940s he became music director of a theatre company. He carved out a career as an innovative composer but in the 1950s he turned more and more to conducting. He conducted his own material and then expanded to include the works of others starting in 1959 with Bartók at the Aix-en-Provence and Donaueschingen Festivals. Appearances followed with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Bavarian Radio Symphony, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and Orchestre National de France.
Boulez made his operatic conducting debut in 1963 at the Opéra National de Paris and appeared with the Frankfurt Opera, the Bayreuth Festival and the Osaka Festival. The Edinburgh International Festival in 1965 saw his first major presentation as conductor of his own work and he became principal guest conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra in America.
He conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic and appeared annually in Cleveland and with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He continued to write and also conducted opera in Wales, the Netherlands and France. He made his last appearance as conductor in Salzburg in January 2012 with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and Mitsuko Uchida. He died at his home in Baden-Baden on 5th January 2016.
