Boulez: Complete Music For Solo Piano – Ponthus

   in Piano International (May, 2016)
Marc Ponthus focuses on Boulez’s early career: most of his solo keyboard output was written during his twenties, his most radical phase as composer. The results remain some of the most challenging in the piano repertoire. Summits are complemented by lower peaks; the most accessible of them, the aphoristic Notations from 1945, show the clearest links with the tradition of French pianism. These shorter works are like bookends: after a long period of piano silence, came Incises from 1994 – Pontus plays the expanded 2001 version, with its opposition of strict and free time – and a brief coda, Une page d’ephéméride (2005).

If the short pieces connect with French pianism, …