Three Sonatas Archive

BOULEZ: Complete Music for Solo Piano – Marc Ponthus, p. – Bridge (2 discs)

by Audiophile Audition | Jun 12, 2016 | Classical CD Reviews

Often neglected music by a controversial and sometimes inconsistent composer…but not here! BOULEZ: Complete Music for Solo Piano – Marc Ponthus, piano – Bridge 9456 A/B (2 CDs), TT: 80:35 ****: So let’s list them: Three Sonatas, 12 Notations, Incises, Une page d’ephemeride—that’s it. One would think that someone like Boulez would have completed many more piano works during the course of his long and semi-productive life, but his penchant for ongoing, incomplete, and constantly revised pieces would seem to work against it. Add to that the Leonard Bernstein problem—the attraction, demands, and difficulties of balancing a conducting career with the composing instinct–and I guess it’s not too hard to see why the output is somewhat limited. However, small though it is, it is also very important. Most of the music is very early, the enfant terrible at work coming to terms with the Second Viennese School, and then advancing their initial efforts into something bordering on the radical. The first effort, 12 Notations, constitute the first real encounters with Berg-Webern-Schoenberg triumph, and the results are an elegant and naïve attempt to internalize the essence of these composers. Boulez dismissed them for years, then returned later to orchestrate several of […]