Search - Pierre Boulez, Jean [1] Barraque, Pi-hsien Chen :: Pierre Boulez: Troisième sonate; Douze notations; Jean Barraqué: Sonate pour piano

Piano labyrinths,rarefied,structural challenges,

scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 07/25/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"In one of the three biographies on Michel Foucault, he relates a tale of Boulez, Barraque and Foucault all meeting in some castle for a concert where their music was to be played.Barraque and Foucault remained friends and shared intellectual and aesthetic pursuits until Barraque untimely death.. Barraque as this 'Sonata' admirably reflects was interested in extremes of expression,and the current buzz in France in the Fifties was this sensibility, as the theatre of cruelty of Antonin Artaud and the literature of Samuel Beckett, the rationalism of the irrational. I don't quite agree that the Barraque Sonata is a masterwork of this century, or the last one, but within the context of the set of aesthetic trajectories nurtured by European creativity at that time, Barraque was in the conceptual pit,slugging away. Andre Hodier's old book on French contemporary music is the first and really the only discussion of Barraque. What is significant of this 'Sonata' for its times was the retrogressive perspective,and its length. Beethoven was Barraque's creative icon,as opposed to the Schoenberg School for Boulez and the post war avant-garde. Barraque seemed to think that the rigours of serial music needed to contain this sense of durationally large architectural forms. The 'Sonata' works,its length and gestures, because it is primarily rhythmically charged. Always the intuitive ends is what saves what can be pedantic creative agendas. The work is in two large movements one fast, the other slow, but there are necessarily gradations within each movement of speeding up or slowing down. Barraque as well came to serialism with his own sense,forgetting about the tyranny of the interval, where only dissonance was to be exploited. Here we hear open fifths, and relatively wonderfullly pleasant sounding timbres. Hearing/Encountering/Appraising then the Boulez 'Third Sonata', is like having a bucket of ice water thrown over your head. For the 'Third' accelerates the challenge although even today it is a difficult work to encounter. It is not as lyrically directional or on its surface gesturally predictable as the 'First' or 'Second' Sonatas. Boulez here clearly wanted to mark/succomb and conquer new structural territories. The buzz of "Indeterminacy" was in the air,of open forms, the mobiles of Alexander Calder and with the freshness of John Cage coming to Europe in the early Fifties to loosen up the sometimes(most of the times) tyrannical mindsets of these post- war post- serialists as Stockhausen and Boulez harbored was quite important. Theodor Adorno always thought they were too serious,too much concerned with the surface of their art without looking out creating some worldview to be utilized in their music.,too much concerned pure technique rather than philosophic/social substance.The Third Sonata which Boulez explains in his position paper included in "Orientations", "Sonata, What do you want from me?", "Sonate, que me veux-tu?",pages 143-54, is good start if you want to understand the excitement of these newly found structural departures. And also Boulez's lifelong affinity and inspiration he searched for from Mallarme,the concept of the book, that every part of a book should be enriched by its preceeding encounters, concepts you can quite literally devote ones life to. Here Chen plays wonderfully sensitive to Boulez's deep musicianship and structural vision, the elegance,and rarefied refinement,almost surreal, but also the open brutality, and the vigorously new approach toward exploiting the resonant physical features of the piano, as piano harmonics, that's where you depress tones silently then striking violently others thereby enleashing the sympathetic overtone vibrations. Also the utilizations of all the piano pedals to alter the timbral resonance, is here incorporated into Boulez structures.Tristan Murail, the younger generation French IRCAM composer has further developed these resonant piano techniques se his piano solo 'Terratoires De l'Oubli'. The structure of the Boulez work itself has metamorphosized into varying states in incompletion since the time it was first written in the late Fifties. But the original plan was five movements, or Boulez calls them formatives, (formants in French), and were 1. Antiphonie; 2 Trope; 3. Constellation; 4.Strophe; 5 Sequence;, Constellation being the longest in duration here. Each piece of formant,or movement allows the possibilities of choice, like being given a map to direct your own destinations. The first complete performance of this work was some ten hears later by Boulez himself at Darmstadt in September,1967. Here Chen adopts,fashions the 'Trope' movementwhihc is the second movement(formative) (formant) which comprises four sections, 'Texte', 'Parenthese', 'Commentaire', and 'Glose'. The only other order,is reversing 'Glose' with 'Constellation' which you'll find in the Charles Rosen and Claude Helffer earlier recordings.'Miroir' then follows this.Claude Helffer also includes formant #3,which is about 11 n a half minutes and consists of other materials, 'Points, Blocs, Points 2, Blocs 2' The titles are extracted from medeival sensibility of discourse and duration,and each movement of the movwement(Formatives) here has self-contained like features. 'Texte' is more one-dimensional monodic,with a serial like cantus firmus, 'Parenthese', is a slow tempo but is interrupted by parenthesis of fragments of music Boulez writes in boxes within the music line or system. 'Glose' as well is slow but undergoes frequent gradations of accelerations. This has been the Boulez approach of the dialectic between relatively fixed musical structures, and interruptions of those via complex means and techniques. His 'Repons', and his conducting of Mahler retains/contains similar approaches to form, interpretation and approach. The 'Third Sonata' also retains a musical sense of elegance structurally and interms of its extended pallette of timbres. It is still difficult listening.The earlier student 'Notations' has numerous recordings,Stephan McCallum is one I prefer,but Chen is right on the money here as well exposing the space threadbare piano lines of the young visionary composer. 'Notations' has above all documentary value,in the realizations of the odyssey of the Boulez's creative lifeworld.As the agricultural seeds known to be buried with Egyptian priests,when some centuries later when they discovered the seeds they still brought something to the surface, as similarly the orchestral realizations of Notations by Boulez are far more a greater conception."

Chens brings Barraque's Sonata to life.

Karl Henzy | 05/15/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I want to thank Marin County, CA for his advice about the Chen rendition of the Sonata. I already had the CPO complete Barraque, which has a great realization of the Mort de Virgile, but the Sonata on that disc had left me cold. Chen's version brings it to life, especially in the fast first movement. The proper recording can make all the difference. I found this to be so with Aleck Karis's recording of Elliott Carter's great Night Fantasies, which I think much better than Charles Rosen's version. Barraque's Sonata and Carter's Night Fantasies are, I think, the two greatest works for solo piano in the second half-century, and the greatest long solo piano works (not broken up into short, separate sections, like Schoenberg's Suite) since Ives' great Concord Sonata."

Best current recording of the Barraque Piano Sonata

scarecrow | 12/09/1998

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Although I don't claim to have an expert opinion on Jean Barraque's celebrated ( in avant garde circles ) piano sonata, having only listened to the piece four separate times, I would like to recommend Pi-hsien Chen's recording as being far superior to the version included in the otherwise excellent CPO label release of Barraque's complete works. First, Ms. Chen's version is much closer to the composer's estimate of duration, a crucially important point. Given the abstract nature of this immense work, any unnecessary prolongation makes the musical "argument" ( already abstract ) harder to discern. Mr. Litwin's version is a full 14 minutes past the composer's indication of c. 40 minutes ( Ms. Chen's version is 45' ). Secondly, I happened to appreciate Ms. Chen's fuller application of dynamic contrasts; whether this follows Barraque's intentions more closely or not I can't say ( I don't have the score ), however, it did add to the listening experience. For those who appreciate the music of Carter, Stockhausen and Boulez, I would recommend this recording without reserve."