Search - Pierre Boulez, Pierre-Andre Valade, Ensemble InterContemporain :: Boulez: Notations; Structures; ...explosante-fixe...

Who needs a sell-out like Gorecki with music this moving?

Christopher Culver | 01/25/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"...explosante-fixe... is Boulez's masterpiece. Like many of his works since the late 1950s (beginning with works like Structures Book II [also on this disk] and Pli selon pli), Boulez focuses on a central collection of pitches and explores these in various colorations and permutations. This is a technique, then, not unlike what one finds in Berio or Messiaen. The result is that ...explosante-fixe... is also one of Boulez's most accessible works.It's also one of his most moving. It's well known that _Originel_ with which the piece closes doubles as Boulez's _Memoriale_, a piece written in memory of the flautist Laurence Beauregard. Yet even setting this association aside, one finds that, after immersing oneself in the 30 minutes that lead up to _Originel_, the last seven or eight minutes are among perhaps the most moving moments in the music of the last half of the twentieth century.And the best thing is Boulez does it all without selling out!"

Classic Boulez penetrable, sensual and mind probing

scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 04/09/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Explosante-Fixe was one of the first work Boulez engaged with the computer assisted musical structures and regular instruments at IRCAM ,the new music mecca somewhere in the bowels of Paris. Of his generation Boulez regardless of the engagement of an intellectual agenda for music always imparts his deep sensual feel to his works. He certainly learned much from Debussy. This work concerns the brokeness of chords the arpeggiated sound. There is more than one version and Boulez is the incessant re-negotiator of his work, always rethinking,revising, it points to the values of the postmodernist epoch, which I guess has run its course. The Notations for piano here is a waste of time,perhaps a vanity, Maitre Boulez should record the subsequent realizations for orchestra. That work has a dramatic power a deep labyrinth of sound and timbre exploiting the full colours of the modernist orchestra. I know Barenboim did them with Chicago, now a committed instrument to the Boulezian cause,coming from the deeply Germanic of the Solti years. But these piano pieces are like young budding sketches,pointillistic, engaged with the full register of the piano's roaring and stridently bright sonorities. It is like the seeds archeologist have found in Egyptian tombs, when planted some centuries later,still bore fruit. Needless to say the ghost of Meesiaen appears here in the piano solo hovering above. The Structures is the laboritorio of the piano,coldly conceived,brutal,uncompromising and rugged, and from a fascinating perspective is like an electric music thinker's realization for the two pianos. You actually cannot distinguish where one begins and the other trails into it. This work is pure expressionism, yet gently poetic and evocative. The fact that this work still elicits negative responses points to its avant-gardism, its ability to shock and subvert, change and challenge the confines of the classical canon"