Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the landmark compositions of the 20th century, December 24, 1999
I have literally waited years to hear Repons and am not disappointed. For years it had been talked about as landmark work from this, the arguably most profound of post-war composers. Boulez, as always succeeds in creating his own hynotic, jewelled, glittering, and almost mystical sound world. It is a sound world which has over the years matured to become even more subtle, more evocative, more obsessively fascinating. Through huge stretches of the work time seems to held in suspended animation only to be allowed to erupt forth from its former captivity with frenetic energy only moments later. Boulez's many enemies have always claimed that his music lacks the power to move the listener. But whoever really listens - yes, really listens to this work can only but be deeply moved, not by its wearing heart on sleeve, but by the sheer sense of boundless awe and wonder which the work so effortlessly evokes. As arpeggio is layered upon arpeggio, and amplified seemingly into infinity the sense of awe is like that of the starry night sky, for like it the impact is not one of a simple and singular emotive response but one that is somehow abstract - and thereby utterly impossible to convey with words. Indeed this is truly one of the artistic landmarks of the 20th century
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fabulous textures,long blankets,sound screens taking off, April 27, 1999
By A Customer
Boulez hesitated to record this masterpiece. And it's odd, very odd that we here the other side of the Atlantic had to wait this long to hear it. Of course you could have been like writer Jean Genet, who returned from a writing assignment in the Middle East to hear "Repons" in Paris. Boulez gives us long,richly textured timbral fields of sounds. You always sense control, that things, the various string tremoli for instance or the fast and frantic,clipped woodwinds never go off uncontrollably. The concept here of arpeggiated sound works well it gives a propulsive impetus,like electric charges,or short lightining bolts recharging the proceedings. Boulez was always fond of the harp and piano broken chords,(arpeggios) and ringing sonorities. This is here repeated as in his vocal works, only with a deep global-like maturity. Moments recede into the deeply textured sustained chords. You have never heard Boulez like this in "Repons" It is music one needs I think to be nourished in some creative emotive way. Long static screens. So powerful was this work that Boulez's people in Paris couldn't help an indirect copy like Peter Eotvos's "Chinese Opera" composers, Murail and Dufourt all owe something here to "Repons" and its conception. The "Dialogue de l'ombre double" when put along "Repons" comes off like a modest etude. Still it is the best piece yet featuring the solo clarinet with its "shadow".
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31 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Sound and the Theory., November 8, 2001
Arnold Schoenberg once dropped the zeugmatic question: "Am I the only one who thinks Msr. Boulez' music is mindlessly pretty, and pretty mindless?" Since Schoenberg couldn't have heard much beyond the first piano sonatas, the question is forgivable. Often I also wondered, while listening to early works like the Gurreliederesque song-cycle Le Visage Nuptial, why Boulez was ever considered so intractable in the first place. For all his dry-as-dust theorizing, the music itself was clearly intended to be the next step onward from Debussy, luxuriating in sound qua sound, with little to no intellectual content besides the creation of new sounds, new and ever more ear-tickling combinations of instruments. The massed note clusters in those piano sonatas aren't choquant, percussive Bartokian wallops, intended to rattle the dentures of the Schumann-loving concertgoers, but three-dimensional, non-linear mini-universes. The point, as with New Age music today, was to lose yourself. How bourgeois -- even if the bourgeois didn't get it.
Repons both is and isn't different. It's his most tropical profusion of pure sound yet, but at the same time, it illuminates the lifelong Boulez project while deepening it incommensurably. What makes Repons special, and separates it from all the IRCAM compositions that followed in its wake -- since they're all reactions for or against the father-figure Boulez, they're automatically disqualified from Repons' peculiar purity -- is the feeling that it's self-generating, that it HAS NO AUTHOR. By way of contrast, Iannis Xenakis, that other leader of the 20th cent. European avant-garde, was always up front and center in his compositions. Even when a piece was entirely rendered on a computer or based on some arbitrary astronomical formula he would carefully select and arrange the preprocessed musical information to get across a specific effect that bore the stamp of his distinctly saturnine personality. As a result, you could always sense his volcanic need to get his suffering across. The only time we sense Boulez here, though, is in the very first bar, as he nudges the little tiny snowball down the hill with his toe. What inevitably follows gives off the impression, the illusion, that he's watching this fearsome, village-threatening accretion from the sidelines along with us.
Majestic, no? Repons could only be the upshot of Boulez' extensive conducting in the 1970's, where, in order to earn his keep, he had to try to develop some sympathy for people he previously reviled, and here I'm primarily thinking of that most famous devotee of orchestral bloat: Gustav Mahler. Mahler said music should contain the world and everything in it; Boulez, with Repons, takes this concept even further. Instead of transcribing natural phenomena into musical notation, making the mountains sing and the oceans upheave, and dabbling in proto-Messiaenic birdsong along the way, Boulez creates his own highly rarefied world and decides what it should and should not contain. He plays god, and for the forty minutes that Repons takes to unfold, you are his vassal, subservient to his rules.
How does this differ from listening to any piece of music or reading any book where we're at the mercy of an author and his very specific ethos? Simply because, as long as an author is implicit, he's there for us to gauge our closeness to ( or alienation from. ) Repons, having no author -- that's the conceit, at least, and it's an extremely believable one when you listen -- exists in an uncritical, unmediated space, a law unto itself. If you play it, you are it -- "it," of course, being Pierre Boulez. Almost every artist has dreamed of taking himself out of the picture, of letting the work speak for itself, but those who have succeeded can now be counted on one finger. By effacing himself utterly, Boulez has discovered new heights of creative megalomania.
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~ Ensemble Intercontemporain
~ Pierre Boulez
~ Gyorgy Ligeti
by Ensemble InterContemporain 
