Do you crave the Jean Barraqué Piano Sonata’s hard serial core and frequent use of silences but don’t have 45 minutes to sit through it all? Here’s your solution: Franco Evangelisti’s “proiezioni sonore”, whose two movements total less than four minutes and mirror the Barraqué’s terse bleakness to more succinct effect. But maybe you need a little more time, say, five minutes over the course of three movements? Well, then, Aldo Clementi’s Composizione N. 1 will fit the bill. The remaining selections encompass more familiar fare from Darmstadt’s salad days. Steffen Schleiermacher gobbles up the jagged rhythmic outlines of Messiaen’s Cantéyodjaya like an unbridled puppy but lacks the color and nuance of Peter Serkin’s recent version for Koch. The hollow sonics hardly help matters, and the piano’s tuning goes out of whack too many times past the permanence quota. A pity, for Schleiermacher’s Boulez Third (or, shall we say, as much of this unfinished work as Boulez has published) binds the music’s discontinuous gestures into a big-boned, shapely, and exciting whole. Similarly, the almost-impressionistic textures of Stockhausen’s Klavierstucke V call out for a first-rate piano and better engineering. The best way to obtain Stockhausen’s piano music is still through the hard-to-find Wambach (Koch/Schwann) or Kontarsky (Sony) cycles. Idil Biret (Naxos) and Claude Helffer (Naïve-Montaigne) remain top recommendations for those who want all three Boulez sonatas on a single disc. [7/17/2001]
