These discs chart the ceaseless exploration of Boulez’s early creativity. Back in 1946, the First Piano Sonata revealed the 21-year-old composer as an unlikely heir to Schoenbergian serialism. Its two complementary movements are more than a preparation, less than a model for the Second Sonata, which combines serial thinking with a formal dynamism recalling Beethoven and Liszt. The veritable onslaught of the first movement is no more reckless than are the intricately planned climaxes of slow movement and finale, the B-A-C-H motive threading its way unobtrusively through the latter’s meditative coda.
Past allegiances had been severed by the time of Polyphonie X, Boulez’s attempt to transfer integrated serialism onto a larger canvas. A striking failure, the musical fabric holds together in the opening section but comes apart in the latter stages; the restive audience responds as if to a tightrope walker about to fall. The Third Piano Sonata is Boulez’s attempt to define an ‘open’ structure, where choices made in performance endow a sense of completeness, leavening the earlier formal rigour in the process. Only two of its five movements have yet been realised, though, and their success as music depends on how clearly you sense variety in the alternating elements of ‘Constellation-Miroir’ and the rearrangeable components of ‘Trope’.
Boulez’s formal experiments were to be fulfilled in the poetic elaboration of Pli selon pli, of which this Tombeau is the work’s intense concluding movement in chrysalis. Poesie pour pouvoir proves a fascinating cul-de-sac, the combination of live orchestra with tape (featuring a histrionic rendition of an aggressively misanthropic Michaux text) unsatisfying in the wake of pioneering efforts by Varese and Stockhausen; Boulez’s electronic convictions (heard to impressive effect on two recent discs on DG 20/21, 3/99 and 1/01) would not be met for another quarter-century. The present survey is concluded by a characterful realisation with Loriod of Structures II: a final declaration of intent before two decades of conducting and administration which left little time for breaking new ground compositionally.
Helffer’s accounts of the sonatas, despite shallow recorded sound, have the authoritative edge over Biret. Aimard and Boffard find more expressive nuance in Structures II, but the Col Legno disc is self-recommending to anyone wishing to follow the development of a singular musical mind