Prom 17: Beethoven & Boulez by Beethoven, Boulez, Fra (2012/2012), Dirigent François-Xavier Roth, Royal Albert Hall, London, United Kingdom

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