Boulez - Pli selon pli. Les soleil des eaux. Le visage nuptial. Figures, Doubles, Prismes

Phyllis Bryn-Julson sop Elisabeth Laurence mez BBC Singers; BBC Symphony Orchestra / Pierre Boulez

Warner Apex 2564 62083-2 Buy now

(129’ · DDD · T/t)

This is a super-budget-price reissue of four of Boulez’s most imposing earlier works. True, the 1981 Pli selon pli doesn’t give you his most recent thoughts on his endlessly evolving Mallarmé portrait – for that you need the DG account. But this BBC version, a Gramophone Award-winner in 1983, remains a very satisfying document of its time. A special strength of the set as a whole is the vividness with which it demonstrates what has been lost in Boulez’s complete abandonment of writing for the voice since the 1980s.

The large-scale cantata Le visage nuptial, originally composed in 1946, but performed here in the revised version from 1988-89, has an expressive incandescence and a sustained dramatic power that not only reconcile you to René Char’s convoluted verse but provoke the thought that Boulez might, after all, be contemporary music’s greatest opera composer manqué. The BBC Singers have have probably never done anything finer on disc.

More subversive dynamism can be heard in the expansive, eruptive monumentality of the orchestral Figures, Doubles, Prismes, strikingly enigmatic in its commitment to strongly sustained oppositions, and bringing back the composer’s own 1985 reading. Add to all this the fascinating feline glitter of Le soleil des eaux and you have a ‘portrait de Boulez’ of exceptional quality.