The Philharmonie de Paris offers free streaming of a concert recorded in celebration of the composer’s 90th birthday last year.

In tribute to the late Pierre Boulez, the Philharmonie de Paris is streaming a recording of a live concert by the new music group founded by the French composer, Ensemble Intercontemporain. Performing some of Boulez’s most lauded works, the concert was given as part of a weekend-long series in celebration of Boulez’s 90th birthday last year.

It’s a fitting venue for a tribute to the revered composer, who was one of the principal instigators behind the new Philharmonie de Paris concert hall’s construction. For more than 50 years, Boulez established music research centres, initiated performance space constructions, and assisted with the foundation of ensembles. Paris’ premier performance venue, the Cite de la Musique, opened in 1995 and encapsulated Boulez’s dream for an advanced concert hall equipped with electric sound and flexible layout to host contemporary works. However the Cite only seats 900, and by the turn of the century, Boulez was already planning for a new concert hall to host big symphony orchestras.

Designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, the Philharmonie de Paris ranks among the most expensive concert halls in the world, having overshot its budget and construction period to cost over €390 million. Over 200,000 bird-shaped tiles in various shades of grey, cream and brown aluminium are scattered across the outside surfaces. The interior of the 2,400-seat concert hall is just as stunning as the exterior, incorporating two long-appreciated approaches for the best acoustic design.

 The auditorium of the Philharmonie de Paris

The basic design is a vineyard, where performers are in the centre and the audience encircles them on sloping terraces. However new technology allows the seats to disappear into walls, creating the shoebox design that was popular in the second half of the 19th century, built as a rectangle where performers are seated at one end of a long hall with high walls to reflect the sound. The space is large, but the seating design means that every audience member will be close to the music. As chief executive Laurent Bayle explained to the Guardian, “no audience member will be more than 32 metres away from the performers.”

The venue symbolically represents Boulez’s belief that music can bridge the divides of society. On one side of the building sit the Hausmann boulevards in the ancient centre of Paris, representative of the wealthy cultural urbanites. On the other side lie the less financially stable suburbs of France. Bayle’s inspiration for the opening season is that it be one to break down the barriers of society and classical music, to “shake up the ritual of the concert, prioritise education programmes for young people and make links between musical genres.”

To honour Pierre Boulez’s lifelong contribution to the musical world of Paris and international stages, the Philharmonie will stream the concert from 2015 featuring Boulez’Dialogue de l’ombre double extraits, Improvisation I, Messagesquisse, Dérive 1 pour six instruments, Improvisation II, Notations pour orchestre I-4, and Notations pour orchestre VII.

You can watch the Boulez In Memoriam performance here