Time for some music - and a discovery for me as well.I found this CD in one of my charity shop haunts for a quid - a resissue of one of the few pieces by Jean Barraque.
Jean Barraqué - Sonate pour Piano In 1961 the French musician and author André Hodeir, best known as a jazz critic, but also part of the Parisian circle of artists and intellectuals around the young Pierre Boulez, published a book called Since Debussy. Its opinions (which largely coincided with those of Boulez) are generally scathing. Of Stravinsky, he says: “it would be almost indecent to mention him in the same breath with Debussy”, while Schönberg “who remained an exceptional creator as he was busy destroying, ceased to be truly creative as soon as he tried to construct”. Berg (though praised in part) “wasted the last years of his life in a sterile attempt to retrace his steps”. He refers to the “uncertainty and mediocrity” of Bartók’s last works, finds much to admire in Messiaen, but also finds that “even his best pages lack that assertive power which is the sign of the authentic masterpiece”.
So who survives this onslaught? Of the older composers, only the then relatively obscure Anton Webern, who is being hailed—almost sanctified—by the young avant-garde as the “Pioneer of a New Musical Order”. And of the young, just three composers, all of whom just happened to have studied with Messiaen in Paris: Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Jean Barraqué. Stockhausen, though not accorded a chapter of his own, is mentioned frequently with considerable respect. Boulez is hailed (somewhat equivocally!) as “one of the greatest precursory figures in Western art and thought, one of those men without whom things would not be what they are”, yet ultimately, as a young Moses whose work gets stuck at the border of the Promised Land: stuck not least through increasing caution, and an excessive preoccupation with polish and style (coming in the immediate wake of Pli selon pli, this is perhaps a rather prophetic comment).
Barraqué’s Sonata was, and remains, an utterly extraordinary work. By the time the recording emerged, it scarcely represented the latest style – it was (pace Hodeir) firmly lodged in the sonic world of early fifties serialism—yet even in Loriod’s somewhat dubious rendering, it had a unique, almost unsettling ‘presence’: obsessive, almost hypnotic. However seemingly esoteric, it gained a certain cult following, and this was reinforced by a first ‘authentic’ recording of the work, made in 1969 by Claude Helffer, at that time the most authoritative French exponent of new piano music. Good as this was, it was eclipsed a few years later by the present recording, which so impressed the composer that he promised Roger Woodward a Second Sonata. In reality, this was never going to happen—a year later, the already sick composer would be dead—but it is a striking testament to this remarkable performance, here in an extraordinary digital restoration of the original tapes....
In my opinion,it is still the most fearless and visceral performance available with its breakneck start, pantheistic romanticism and silences that are real vacuums, not awkward hiatuses waiting to be interrupted with sound.
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Reissued on Celestial Harmonies CD in 2014
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