BOULEZ ENSEMBLE & FRANÇOIS-XAVIER ROTH

Conductor François-Xavier Roth and alto Donatienne Michel-Dansac join the Boulez Ensemble for Mozart’s virtuosic Oboe Quartet, Schönberg’s early Chamber Symphony, and Boulez’s own Le Marteau sans Maître—three works that mark milestones in their composers’ careers. Mozart wrote his quartet just months before he took the bold step of establishing himself as an independent, self-employed composer in Vienna. The Chamber Symphony stands at the end of Schönberg’s late-Romantic years, looking ahead to atonality and other, more revolutionary things to come. And with Le Marteau, a setting of surrealist poems by René Char for alto and six instrumentalists first heard in 1955, the 30-year-old Boulez created the work that, to this day, has remained most closely associated with his name.