Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
somewhat dated but illuminates past Boulez, February 21, 2005
these interviews are relatively old prior to the Eighties,just when Boulez began guest conducting orchestras within the United States with extended stays as with The Cleveland Orchestra,endorsed by George Szell.
The materials here focus on the early period,the three Piano Sonatas,how each Sonata explored differing concepts and situations where time became expanded and contracted, the First Sonata through two contrasting ideas, the sustained sound, and the pointillistic one,projected within a highly virtuosic context with resonances, great timbres from all registers of the piano. This idea later expanded to full tilt in the longer brutal Second Piano Sonata, and the disintegration of rhythmic, intervallic cells, that come to the surface in great clariy, or come to one as if a lamenting sould looking for nourishment in time,time being like an "oxygen" for intervals.The Flute Sonatine as well is discussed,cut from the same field as the First Sonata,and we find the excitement of expanded 12 Tone technique and when these works became first published by Amphion,also some discussion on the more rarified air,the dodecaphonic developments in his latter 'structures for two pianos', where electronic timbral thinking was the focus almost the infinite array and distribution of the row, although Boulez saw the reiteration of the 12 Tones to be uninteresting,and simply at times preferred to state only 9 Tones.We learn that Boulez had performed his "structures" with Yvonne Loriod on tour in Europe.There is a recording as well.
The problematics of the interface between electronic sound and acoustic is discussed here as well, like the orchestra, as his 'poesie our pouvoir' (1958) withdrawn "Polyphonic X" for 18 instruments;it was Stockhausen who really resolved this paradigm and Boulez himself although decades later at IRCAM and the 4X computer systems.
Deliege has long been in the Boulez camp writing essays on his music along with Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Dominique Jameaux, Jean Vermeil,and Joan Peyser.
The early Boulez aesthetic was quite fascinating,coming from the ravages and cultural freeze of the Second World War. You can say Boulez always developed his own path and did not stay in anyone's shadow for too long,as Messiaen at first, then the dodecaphonic grandfathers as Schoenberg,Webern, Berg,then John Cage, (concepts of the indeterminate, aleatoric)Mallarme-ian and James Joyce orientations in literature then was the citadel where complexity and the "unknown" began to be explored, as he says in these interviews, and Mallarme's "Livre" "Blue Notebook, a collection of loose pages, of works that can be read in any order was a great bolt of illumination if you place yourself within the context of the Fifties, actually within a culture that was quite conservative on both sides of the Atlantic.So much so that contemporary music was not considered an important vigorous art as then Gaullist cultural Czar Andre Malraux promuligated,someone who should have known better. Boulez emigrated, then found fertile ground in Germany,in Baden-Baden conducting with increased responsibilities, and then seeking introductions to power brokers, as Paul Sacher, Wieland Wagner, Sir William Glock.All this is made explicit in these interviews.
The Boulez aesthetic has always search-with differing success-for the situation where the work functions by itself, where the materials (as the early Piano Sonatas),or the "Mallarme Improvisations"(Three Parts) take on an independence of thought, where the works come to write themselves from the inevitable agenda put in place.This later finding the ultimate "automata" compositional procedure in the "Notations for Orchestra" where Boulez simply found pleasure in the orchestration of youthful 12 piano pieces of somewhat a naive import.
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