David Hurwitz may have scared Classicstoday.com readers away from Boulez’s piano music when he reviewed Paavali Jumppanen’s recording of the Three Sonatas (type Q8692 in Search Reviews). Yet contrary to my colleague’s well reasoned rejection of the 1948 Second Sonata as an “obsolete, emotionally sterile essay”, here I find the composer’s rigorous serial idiom full of rhythmic vibrancy, tension and release, dramatic textural contrasts, and even lyrical beauty.
I first heard the work as a teenager, when Frederic Rzewski played it at the Port Washington Library in New York. A few years later I purchased its most readily available LP recording, featuring pianist Idil Biret on Atlantic Records’ short-lived subsidiary classical label Finnadar, coupled with Webern’s Op. 27 Variations. Biret has reissued this 1972 release on her own label, along with the Berg Op. 1 sonata.
Rehearing the Boulez after so many years, I’m jolted anew by Biret’s stinging trills, pulverizing chords, and generally fast tempos that sweep the listener along Boulez’s thorny keyboard roads. This impression has a lot to do with the recording’s dry, extremely close microphone pickup. While I prefer the more resonant ambience and more meticulous attention to dynamics characterizing Biret’s 1995 Naxos remake, the earlier version’s verve and immediacy remains palpable.
Biret fares best in the Webern Variations first movement, as she shapes the sparse intervals with appropriate delicacy and melodic cogency. But the following Sehr Schnell falls short of Charles Rosen’s brisker, more lilting and timbrally contrasted recording, let alone Piotr Anderszewski’s amazingly micromanaged detailing. Most pianists get through Berg’s sonata somewhere between 11 and 13 minutes; Biret clocks in a few seconds short of 17. This is largely due to her extreme rubatos and arguably exaggerated observance of the composer’s numerous accelerandos, ritards, and other tempo modifications.
However, Biret’s three-dimensional clarification of Berg’s complex contrapuntal keyboard writing manages to hold everything together. While the passing years have brought forth more musically consistent and sonically superior versions of these three works, there’s much to be said for the young Idil Biret’s formidable prowess and individuality.
