Edgard Varèse – Offrandes

Performance / Video:
Pierre Boulez conducting the Ensemble Intercontemporain, with singer Anna Steiger, in a 1991 concert recorded at the Alte Oper Frankfurt, Germany. Born in Paris, 22 December 1883, Varèse referred to his basic ideas as “sound masses”, or elements of musical sound characterized mainly by their instrumentation, registration, rhythmic shape, intervallic relationship, and volume. Offrandes, for soprano and chamber orchestra was written in 1921, and was his first work to be performed in the US. It is divided into two sections, both of which are settings of poems in French. Varèse’s catalogue contains only a handful of surviving pieces (the pieces written before 1920 were all destroyed by him or lost in a fire), but he is now considered to be one of the principal innovators of the first half of the 20th century. He died in New York, 6 November 1965.