A real windfall for contemporary music listeners.
DG has always been friendly to modern classical music. It was up to the minute during the audience-testing times of the post-WWII avant-garde and remains so now, with regular releases of some of today’s far more accessible new music, such as Max Richter’s recomposition of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons and Hilary Hahn’s addictive recent programme of encores she commissioned for her concert performances.
Pierre Boulez has been associated with the DG label since the early 1990s. One of a small number of artists whose genius extends to both composing and conducting, he took up the baton during the 1950s to ensure competent performances of his very complex music and that of colleagues whose work made similarly fierce demands on musicians. Eventually he signed on with CBS (later Sony) and later with French label Erato, both of which allowed him to record much of his own music.
DG followed the same policy after he signed a contract with them in 1992. By this time he had established a reputation as one of the world’s leading conductors, his earlier notoriety as a perpetrator of super-accurate but chilly interpretations (the members of the New York Philharmonic nicknamed him “the French Correction”) largely behind him. His sensitivities broadened with time and his repertoire expanded beyond the modernist masters to include Mahler, Wagner and even Bruckner.
At DG he produced a series of masterly recordings of music by Debussy, Ravel, Mahler, Bartok, Szymanowski, Stravinsky and others, but interspersed among them were accounts of his own work, reflecting his latest thoughts on each composition. Listeners who enjoyed his music looked forward to these releases as updates because, as a composer, Boulez works in an unusual way.
He rarely considers any of his compositions to be truly finished. He will return to a work, sometimes after decades, to extend or refine it. Some of his early pieces have been left untouched, but others have been almost completely transformed through multiple revisions.
In this new set, DG has been given access to the back catalogues of Sony and Erato to assemble what Boulez considers to be the best interpretations of each of his works to date. This is not the place to consider each piece and performance, but I’d like to point out a few highlights.
Most listeners who are drawn to Boulez’s work will almost certainly own many of the performances included in this set, as well as earlier interpretations by the composer not to be found here. While listening to, say, the performance of Pli Selon Pli by soprano Christine Schäfer with the Ensemble InterContemporain, it’s hard to miss that Boulez, in addition to refining and adding to the score (especially in the “Improvisation III on Mallarmé” movement), has also slowed the tempo down, quite drastically at times. If you compare this account with his first recording in 1969, made with the BBC Symphony and soprano Halina Lukomska — or a later one with Phyllis Bryn-Julson for Erato in the early 1980s — the newer version is more ethereal than ever, although some of the electricity of its predecessor is gone. It would have been nice if DG had included the first one for comparison (I prefer it), but it is still available from Sony at mid-price.
The same slowing down and sharpened focus can be heard in Boulez’s latest recording, also with Schäfer and the Ensemble InterContemporain, of the 1955 masterpiece Le Marteau Sans Maître. This setting of verse by René Char for alto and a chamber ensemble with a vaguely gamelan-like sound is probably Boulez’s best-known piece, and there have been several recordings. Here, DG has also included the 1964 version, also composer-conducted, with Jeanne Deroubaix and the great Severino Gazzelloni playing the crucial solo flute part. To my ear, this is still the interpretation to beat and the remastered sound is an improvement on my old LP, but comparing it with the new version recorded almost 40 years later shows how much attention Boulez and his musicians lavish on every detail. The earlier account, played at top speed, gains in brilliance what it loses in expressive precision, when the two are heard in succession.
When the newer version of Le Marteau first appeared on CD in 2006, it shared the disc with the then-latest version of Dérive 2 For 11 Instruments, a piece composed in homage to Boulez’s friend William Glock, the director of music at the BBC and a man who was very receptive to difficult modern music. That rendition clocked in at 24:33. Boulez subsequently returned to it and the version we hear in the new set, with the composer conducting the Ensemble InterContemporain, has grown to 43:59.
This piece, played at what seems like superhuman speed and nimbleness by the Ensemble, is a dazzling, jewelled filigree of sound that will thrill listeners attuned to the composer’s style. The performance supersedes the otherwise very good one by Daniel Kawka released by Harmonia Mundi last year. The hyper-virtuosity of this account finds its match in the performance included here of another of Boulez’s later extensions of an earlier piece, Sur Incises, an elaboration for three pianos, three harps and three percussionists of the solo piano piece, Incises, which is also included on the same disc, played by Dimitri Vassilakis. The warp-speed playing of all the musicians here seems to transcend the capabilities of mere mortals, but the musicians still manage to contour it with great eloquence.
Listeners coming to this set fresh who start off with the first disc may quickly return it to the shelf and listen to something else. The presentation is roughly chronological, and the first pieces heard, hard-core serial works from early in Boulez’s career, are very difficult to love. It isn’t until the third disc that Le Marteau Sans Maître appears, arguably the first work by Boulez that listeners not familiar with his style might enjoy. But after that, marvels follow.
A few complaints. Why didn’t DG include the earlier version of Dérive 2, from the 2006 CD, for listeners interested in comparing it with the extended version? And while it were going through the Sony back catalogue, it might have been a good idea to resurrect Charles Rosen’s recordings of the First and Third Piano Sonatas, which appeared, won a stack of prizes and were then withdrawn, all within about 10 minutes.
But overall, for listeners who enjoy contemporary classical music, this set is not to be missed, even by those who already own some of the performances on earlier releases. The 248-page, bilingual book included with the set is a resource for Boulez fans (it includes a translation of the interview that fills disc 13) and the remastered sound is a bonus. I purchased my copy online from Amazon.
