Search - Boulez, Damiens, BBC :: Sonatine / Derive

Foundation Boulez

scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 09/11/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The Flute Sonatine and the First Piano Sonata are well-worth re-exploring. The reduction of the serial intervals to noise in both pieces where the sheer velocity, texture of linear ideas reveals beautiful noise.



The :Flute Sonatine: remains a centerpiece in flute repertoire, well not one that everyone's pleased with, but nonetheless these works need to be rediscovered since we have long past modernity, perhaps a revisitation is necessary now that modernity has played itself out.. Well the Sonatine is incredibly violent, where both instruments interrupt each other. There really is no accompaniment here merely textures, blocks of transparent timbre, with a large pallette of timbre, fluttertonguing, tremoli, glissandi, all compacted in short bursts of sound,,

The :First Piano Sonata:,also very different than any other piece a starting point actually when you consider the overdetermined complxities of the following Second and indeterminate/mobile Third Piano Sonata. The First is compact, terse, with a flair for the new however, the modern, revealing what the modern gesture offers the post-war sensibility. of occupied Paris.There is little development here save for simply density and register, timbre all beautiful, ugly and powerful simultaneously with canons and reiterations. I like Aimard and with Boulez the musical gesture simply feels right, allowing the ideas to state themselves assertively, much like Aimard's mentor Yvonne Loriod who also understood the young Boulez.She actually toured with Boulez at one time, in his first book of :Structures: for Two Pianos. Anyway Aimard plays with more conviction, more weight than Claude Helffer or Idil Biret.,who both have interesting reading. It is a matter of preference.Helffer is more electrifying, incredibly fast,lighter in touch, more brilliant sounding, yet he seems directionless,but does give incredibly controlled mystery to the slower moments of the :second movement: more focused than Aimard.



Derive well you've heard it,a modest piece and when placed around others works reveals how threadbare and incidental it actually is. Dedications are like that, and Boulez was on the threshold of Repons, so it is cut from the same cloth, same worktable.



:Dialogue de L'Ombre Double: is the most sucessful antiphonal work, the Antiphones for Violin and Electronics simply has'nt exploited the same conceptual complexity, of the "dialogue" of the timbres bouncing and reiterating morphed with itselves/themselves.



The Clarinet works quite well here with its array of"phanthom" brethren to help sustain it, to reveal differing dimensions, expressive and timbral as we proceed. It comes from "Domaines", an unaccompanied solo, which can be quite uninteresting and with ensemble, it does help.

It is difficult to write for the solo instrument even with the aid of the newly found IRCAM discoveries of the 4 X computer generating systems.It is like Cisco Systems concpets of networking, with various traversing various platforms, Here however thess movements/motions resides within single works, and single concepts of whatever Boulez had in mind.(He discusses these departures with Rocco di Pietri, in published interviews)The unaccompanied solo is something Boulez found very late and to my mind the concept is not suited to his powerful (at times)imagination that relishes raw adorned embellished/unembellished orchestral timbre, tremoli, flutterings of metal sounds and quasi-misterioso moments and gestures.We find this in the early works as I suggested the piano as well revelas the metallic qualities of its sound, the flute as well, is an industrial strength flute timbre."