Bruno Maderna was a close friend of Pierre Boulez . In 1958 Boulez and Maderna were conductors of two of the three orchestras in the fraught premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gruppen , the third orchestra was directed by the composer. My picture above, from the Stockhausen archive , was taken at a rehearsal for the premiere in Cologne. Left clicking on the image will enlarge it. Stockhausen is conducting orchestra 1 on the left, Maderna orchestra 2 in the centre, and Boulez orchestra 3 on the right. The photo at the foot of the article shows Boulez, Maderna and Stockhausen in Darmstadt in 1956, and, interestingly, was taken by Hans Keller . . Maderna's relationship with the BBC Symphony Orchestra was established before Boulez's period as the orchestra's chief conductor, and was one of the many fruits of William Glock's period as BBC Controller of Music between 1959 and 1972. Maderna made his debut with the orchestra in 1959 when he gave the first public perfo...
Comments
This is patently tangential, but I have just to observe that as a piece of music journalism it was vastly best than that ludicrous tosh about "Jennens' Messiah" in the Telegraph yesterday. Mind you, I think there was a crossover there with another current topic, for I suspect the PR/Promotions dunderheads at the Handel Museum were behind it. And a right embarrassing hash they made of it.