Customer Reviews

Pierre Boulez ~ Schoenberg · Berio · Carter · Kurtág · Xenakis

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Listen--this set is actually a great buy, though it may seem like too much of an investment. But for your 45 bucks you get five discs (only $9 per disc), and it has to be one of the best collections of modern music ever, played by Boulez' spectacular group, Ensemble InterContemporain. Look at what you get: Schoenberg's Variations for Orchestra (his most beautiful serialist composition); Berio's Sinfonia (a contemporary classic); Carter's Oboe Concerto, Mirror on Which to Dwell, and Penthode (for Carter fans, the disc is a must, since it's currently the only place you can get the concerto and Penthode, both essential Carter); Kurtag's Troussova (searing), Birtwistle's AGM (powerful, mysterious), Ferneyhough's Funerailles (electric), and Xenakis's Jalons (one of his best). For one purchase, you'll find yourself right in the thick of modern music.

I concur this is the only place to find these masterworks, not all but the Carter pieces,Penthode I know of no other recording. This is a marvelously opaque like work, somewhat dry, Carter's penchant utilization of a rhythmic cell passed around the rather dry sounding ensemble. Especially exciting here is Antiphysis by Hughes Dufourt,a French composer philosopher who is quite outspoken on carrying the torch of European post serial modernity. This work is a veiled flute concerto,largely in two seamless movements where the soloist is simply part of the forever trmoili textures the first half of the work, blizzards of flute tones are conveyed,large doses of fluttertonguing,fast filigreed moments. At times the chamber ensemble seems to engulf powerfully the soloist knocking it out of commission and at times Dufourt with incredible surges of timbre. This is a surface piece of incredible power, long stridently sustained chords, like the internal tension of a suspension bridge, You are waiting for something to snap, it doesn't. The percussion moments in this work as well create great waves and impeccably controlled thunderous roars to stop on a dime. You would never know this piece is actually a miniature flute concerto. The flute lines tossed into all registers with colourful again fluttertonguing, wisps and long scale-like lines. Dufourt is not a prolific composer.So this is a rare treat.

Boulez's residencies with The Chicago Symphony over the past ten years has produced a few profound gems from the Post Romantic world,one not entirely his, and Schoenberg's tone poem 'Pelleus und Melisande' in one of them.This is an early post Wagnerian score double the legth of his equally successful 'Transfigured Night'.Unless you know the motives Herr Schoenberg had utilized from the original Maeterlinck play,the work engulfs one as one colossol tone poem/commentary on the wanderings and below the surface anxieties of the union of this pair of lovers,who never quite get it.Schoenberg as Debussy had visions of the darkest moments of the Maeterlinck with rounded timbral orchestrations. Boulez holds a taut reins here and controls this arduously long work with great vision. It's dark colours and thick textures are all balanced properly. You never sense the works length,it moves,lumbers into its moments quite well and when it hunkers down finally on an old fashion minor chord it is arresting.Chicago plays this music as no other,music written for them, with there overdosed,overexposed repertoire of post Romantics from the Solti Years. They put this expereince to its test in the 'Orchestral Variations' also of Schoenberg, a much later work from his brief year spent in Berlin in 1930, a time when he had full confidence in his visions for the dodecaphonic language. Boulez also enjoys this work with a full spectrum of shapes to lend direction from chamber like moments of some of the variations to discreet solos and duets emanating from the orchestral forces to full bodied statements. This is quite an achievement for this newly found language. But you can see Schoenberg moving into these untenable,new regions. For the isolated sense of expressionist colour seems to have been forsakened here,abandoned for a larger homogeneous one. If you know his 'Five Pieces for Orchestra',you sense an entire universe of difference.As if Wagner now has returned to haunt him. The Ensemble Intercontemporain bring a real sense of immediacy to the Ferneyhough, 'Funerailles',a score scaled down to 2 Violins, 2 Violas, 2 Cellos, Doublebass and Harp.It's in the same gestural habitation of the Dufourt, large textural plains,regions of tremoli,punctuated freely.You may not recognize Ferneyhough here this is an early work with large gestures,not the finely attenuated approach to structuring and shaping timbres as you might find for instance in his 'Etudes Trancendental' or the string quartets. Without the Harp here to punctuate the one-dimensional string timbre produced here this work would indeed have been tedious and bland. The right amount of penetrating timbre is here to give the work the thornyness it deserves.If you are a Xenakis fan then his Jalons (steps) here is for you. This is music about the density and timbre transformations. Almost like standing in front of an industrial contraption waiting for it to turn off or break down or heat up.Blast furnace like timbres and strident whistles are here.

I just started getting into modern music a few years ago and this set was one of the best purchases I have made so far. It introduced me to several of my now favorite composers, as well as starting me off with a top-notch recording of their work. The $10 per CD price is very good for contemporary music (which usually runs closer to $20 for a CD). The music covers several composers in much greater depth than your average sampler, and every CD in the set would make a great individual purchase. In addition to the content, the recording quality and performance on each track is uniformly flawless. If you are new to avant-garde music, think of this set as an introductory greatest hits compilation that will remain a treasured purchase no matter how big your collection gets. If you're an experienced contemporary music collector you probably bought this CD as soon as you saw the names on it and the price.

In the 1980s, Pierre Boulez and the Ensemble Intercontemporain recorded a number of fine contemporary pieces for Erato. This box set then collected these discs, but it passed out of print fairly quickly. In time, however, Erato was acquired by Warner Classics, who reissued some of these recordings under its budget line Apex, namely the pieces by Carter, Berio and Xenakis. There's a lot here, and you can read my opinions of the Carter, Berio and Xenakis on the individual Amazon listings, so this review will be limited to those pieces still not available elsewhere that interested me.

Brian Ferneyhough has made his reputation as a composer of extremely difficult works for strings. The two "Funerailles" pieces (1969-80), both for string sextet, double bass, and harp, are meant to be played in the same concert programme but not consecutively. Ferneyhough's music is hyper-complex, going beyond typical mid-century serialism in its organization of all elements. Many of his pieces, I find, lack gestalt and just become dull, grey note spinning. The "Funerailles" pieces, however, are more appealing. In the first, the listener is amazed that a continual flow is established when each note comes from a different instrument than the last, most involving extended techniques: a pizzicato on violin, drumming on the strings of the cello, some icy harmonics. The second piece is more anguished, with longer individual contributions such as a twisting viola line in the background or a harp solo. A fine introduction to the composer, though for me it proved to all go downhill from here.

Gyorgy Kurtag's "Messages of the Late R.V. Trussova" op. 17 (1976-1980), a setting of twenty Russian-language poems of Rimma Dalos for soprano and ensemble. Pierre Boulez's televised performance with the Ensemble Intercontemporain and Csengery in 1981 marked Kurtag's international breakthrough, and it's easy to see why the piece was so instantly likeable. Rimma Dalos, a Russian poet living in Hungary, writes in a tone as charming as a schoolgirl's, but with profound references to a woman's inner self. Kurtag's music accompanies the text perfectly, with the sequence ranging from white-heat eroticism to burlesque. Kurtag's music here is his trademark "Bartok compressed to Webern's brevity", with a prominent part for cimbalom. This is a fine performance, but if you can't track this one down, the recording on Hungaroton with an all-Hungarian ensemble is just as good.

The only English composer that Boulez has championed is Harrison Birtwistle, and here we have his "...agm..." for 16 voices and 3 instrumental groups (1979), a setting of Sappho's fragments that itself feels highly fragmentary. The text is never terribly intelligible, being thrown out by the choir in unstable rhythms. Birtwistle's generally have a severity and greyness to them, but his writing here is suprisingly Boulezian. My only real complaint is that the recording is less than ideal, with the entire ensemble sounding very far away from the microphones. It is really hard to believe that this is an IRCAM recording.

Gerard Grisey's "Modulations" for 33 musicians (1978) came to form part of his great cycle "Les Espaces Acoustiques". Here the spectralist composer presents material that is constantly in flux, with the common bedrock spectrum of "Les Espaces Acoustiques" on a very low E flat (41.2 Hz) becoming progressively transformed towards noise. Boulez's take on "Modulations" is the slowest on recording, 18:36 against Asbury's 16:10 on a Kairos disc and Valade's 13:23 on an Accord set. It has been claimed that Boulez didn't understand the work, and in any event I find the piece works better as part of the entire cycle (the way it segues into the following "Transitoires" is awesome), so its presence here doesn't make the box set especially must-have.

So a few of the pieces still exclusive to this set are interesting, and it is a pity that Warner Classics has not re-released them too.