Boulez at 100

Other Minds presents a celebration of the centennial of Pierre Boulez, comprising an inventive concert of music for two pianos played by Gloria Cheng and Ralph van Raat at Littlefield Concert Hall, Mills College at Northeastern University in Oakland on Wednesday, March 26, 2025, at 7:30 pm. The duo will perform the composer’s rarely heard Structures Books I and II, alongside music by John Cage, Morton Feldman, Frank Zappa, and Magnus Lindberg, concluding with Igor Stravinsky’s elegant neo-classical masterwork Sonata for Two Pianos. This concert is presented in cooperation with the Center for Contemporary Music, Northeastern University and Mills Performing Arts. The concert will be preceded by a lecture at 7:00 pm by musicologist Simon Morrison, Professor of Music at Princeton University.

The eminent French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez (March 26, 1925–January 5, 2016) played a leading role in the development of integral serialism in the 1950s. He went on to play an important role in the field of electronic music, founding the Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique (IRCAM) in Paris in the 1970s. Boulez began his first conducting post in 1958 with the Southwest Radio Symphony Orchestra in Baden-Baden, West Germany and served as principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London (1971–75) and the New York Philharmonic (1971–77). This program highlights both Boulez’ own compositions, as well as his profound impact on the leading composers of 20th Century music.

Pierre Boulez

Structures Livre 1, 1a (1952)

John Cage

Music for Piano 4, 12, 19 (1953)
Experiences No. 1 (1945)

Pierre Boulez

Scherzo (1945)

Morton Feldman

Two Pianos (1957)

Magnus Lindberg

Play (1979)

Pierre Boulez

Structures Livre 2, Chapitre 2 (1961)
Courtes dérives à partir d’Éclat (1996)

Frank Zappa

Ruth Is Sleeping (1992)

Igor Stravinsky

Sonata for Two Pianos (1935)

Over a distinguished and varied career, GRAMMY- and Emmy Award-winning pianist Gloria Cheng has been described by the New York Times as “an invaluable new-music advocate and a preferred collaborator of composers like Pierre Boulez and Esa-Pekka Salonen.” She has been a concerto soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta and Pierre Boulez, and on its acclaimed Green Umbrella series with Salonen and Oliver Knussen. As a recitalist she has appeared at the Ojai Music Festival (where her long association with Boulez began), Chicago Humanities Festival, William Kapell Festival, Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, and Mendocino and Chautauqua Music Festivals. Her countless premieres and dedications include John Williams’ Prelude and Scherzo for Piano and Orchestra (dedicated to her and pianist Lang Lang), Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Dichotomie, and Pierre Boulez’s courtes dérives à partir d’Éclat. She commissioned the two-piano arrangement of Concert Paraphrase on Powder Her Face from Thomas Adès and premiered it with the composer on the Piano Spheres series. Winner of the Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without orchestra) GRAMMY for her 2008 recording, Piano Music of Salonen, Stucky, and Lutosławski, she received a second nomination for her 2013 disc, The Edge of Light: Messiaen/Saariaho. Her film-composer documentary, MONTAGE: Great Film Composers and the Piano, aired on PBS SoCal and captured a 2018 Los Angeles Area Emmy. Her education includes a B.A. in Economics from Stanford University, a Woolley Scholarship for study in Paris, and graduate degrees in performance from UCLA and the University of Southern California, where her teachers included Aube Tzerko and John Perry. Her much sought-after classes and programs at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music bring students together with noted performers, composers, and scholars.

Pianist and musicologist Ralph van Raat (b. 1978) appears as a recitalist in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and the United States. Augmenting traditional repertoire, he takes special interest in the performance of contemporary classical music. He has worked closely with many composers on the interpretation of their piano works, with John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Tan Dun, György Kurtág, Magnus Lindberg, Arvo Pärt, Frederic Rzewski, and Sir John Tavener. Many composers have dedicated their piano compositions to van Raat. Ralph van Raat performs regularly as a soloist with orchestras including London Sinfonietta, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Shanghai Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra and the Dortmunder Philharmoniker. He has worked closely with conductors including Tan Dun, Valery Gergiev, JoAnn Falletta, David Robertson, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Susanna Mälkki, Stefan Asbury, and John Adams. He has performed as a soloist at important festivals including the Gergiev Festival, the BBC Proms, the Festival International de Musique de Besançon, Holland Festival, the Time of Music festival in Viitasaari, Finland, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in the UK, the Berliner Festspiele, the Hong Kong Festival of the Arts and Tanglewood Summer Festival in the United States. He has been given his own concert series at both the Concertgebouw and Muziekgebouw of Amsterdam, and Rotterdam’s De Doelen. Ralph van Raat graduated with honors from both the Conservatory and the University of Amsterdam (musicology). He teaches contemporary piano interpretation at the Conservatory of Amsterdam and the Accademia di Musica Pinerolo (Turin). He also regularly gives masterclasses and lectures at several European conservatories and for many foundations and universities. Van Raat is a Jury member of the Orléans Concours International.