Henck Trepulka

Pierre Boulez - Notations & Piano Sonatas - Pi-hsien Chen (2005) {hat[now]ART 162}
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© 2005 HAT HUT Records | hat[now]ART 162
Classical / Contemporary Classical / Post Modern / Piano Solo

Chen's survey of Boulez's piano music (bar the little competition piece Incises) invites comparisons with Paavali Jumppanen's accounts of the three sonatas released by Deutsche Grammophon earlier in the year. Both are first rate; Chen's tempi are marginally slower, but her approach is more dramatic - some of the early Notations are positively explosive - while Jumppanen explores Boulez's command of keyboard sonority more fastidiously. Both convey the energy of the young Boulez's piano writing. It's hard to believe the Notations were composed 60 years ago, and the First Sonata, with its strange, intensely French flavour, followed a year later; this music still sounds astonishingly fresh.

Roland Pöntinen's warm, expansive tone, wide dynamic range, and steady yet flexible rhythmic sense paint Schoenberg's piano pieces in Brahmsian hues that the composer probably would have appreciated. Some of the pointillistic writing, to be sure, does not match the lightness and transluscence of Uchida in Op. 11 No. 1 or Pollini's more sharply etched Op. 25. However, Pöntinen trumps his competitors for the linear clarity with which he projects Op. 11 No. 3's gnarly polyphony.