Pierre Boulez Piano Works, Ralph van Raat (Naxos)

The Pierre Boulez centennial year has seen a number of important concerts, publications, and recordings devoted to his music. Boulez (1925-2016) wrote three piano sonatas, which are considered important both in his catalog and in the avant-garde repertory. Contemporary music specialists tend to gravitate towards these totemic compositions – Idil Biret has recorded them for Naxos – but there are several other works for piano by Boulez, and they too are worthy of attention. Ralph van Raat has previously recorded for Naxos two selections by him, the early pieces Prelude, Toccata, and Scherzo and Douze Notations (both composed in 1945), the latter of which underwent expansions of some of its movements into pieces for orchestra. 

Thème et variations pour la main gauche (“Theme and Variations for the Left Hand,” also from 1945) was written for Bernard Flavigny. Each of the variations is of a different character, and the virtuosity required to play them is substantial. Instead of the pointillism and counterpoint of Webern, who would soon become Boulez’s preferred composer among the early exponents of 12-tone music, the somewhat classicized deployment of the theme gives the piece a Schoenbergian cast. 3 Psalmodies, yet another piece from the watershed year 1945, owes a debt to Messiaen for its avian filigrees and additive rhythms. Compared to Boulez’s other early pieces, the psalmodies are expansive, adding up to nearly a half hour of music. 

There are also two pieces from later in Boulez’s career. Fragment d’ une ébauche (1987), lives up to its title, being an aphoristic yet dense occasional piece, written in honor of Jean-Marie Lehn’s winning of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Lehn was a colleague of Boulez at the Collége de France, where the composer gave a series of lectures from 1975-1995. 

The final piece on this CD, Incises (2001) is well-wrought  and substantial in its own right, but it was  taken as the starting point for a more elaborate ensemble composition, sur Incises. Indeed, the processes undertaken in the composition of Incises serve as a lynchpin for the materials deployed throughout many of Boulez’s later pieces. Rather than tone rows, intricate manipulation of pitch material based on hexachords (six-note collections) yields a variety of colorful gestures, many based on sonorous verticals, elaborate runs, and trills. 

This is a particularly revealing recording that has been prepared with consummate care. Biret’s renditions of Boulez’s piano sonatas do Naxos proud, but a second installment of the pieces by van Raat would be a welcome addition to their catalog.

• Christian Carey