Track Listing

1. Piano Sonata: Tr�s rapide
2. Piano Sonata: Lent

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #187130 in Music
• Released on: 2000-04-25
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Original recording reissued, Import

Customer Reviews

A near-definitive account of an astonishing masterpiece
Jean Barraque (1928-1973) was one of the group of composers to grow up around the likes of Boulez and Stockhausen in the late forties and early fifties. But unlike the rest of the group, Barraque was always much more of a Romantic in feeling - always expressing a devotion to Beethoven that would have seemed anathema to many of his colleagues. Recently, cpo's three-CD set of his complete acknowledged works deservedly rescued Barraque from obscurity, but unfortunately Stefan Litwin's recording of the sonata was the one failure of the set. Fortunately, Herbert Henck's new recording arrives just in time to rectify this, allowing the listener to hear the Sonata for what it is, an outright masterpiece.

Barraque's sonata has often been spoken of in similar terms to Boulez's second sonata, but in fact it is, to this listener's ears, at least, by some distance a finer work - an astonishing tour-de-force of despair, defiance, and towards the end, uneasy consolation. Henck clearly has made great attempts to study this work, understanding the need for much faster tempi than Litwin, and in particular a greater ferocity of attack in the first movement, where the long silences about two-thirds through should shock and disorientate the listener as they do here. The second movement, with its more ambiguous world, also comes off splendidly.

In short, an oustanding issue. Essential listening for those who know and love Barraque's work, and a good starting point for those who would like to explore the work of this astonishing composer, but don't necessarily want to pay the full whack for the 3-cd cpo set.

austere and rewarding
The word that keeps coming to mind with this piece is "uncompromising." It is a 45-minute work that doesn't exhibit any standard form or progression of events, or, for that matter, any traditional sense of pianism. The texture is strictly single notes that accrue or disintegrate in varying densities.

What Barraque can express in this limited world is impressive. Not self-indulgent formula, the Sonata is a fearless, emphatic statement of belief not only the power of the composer's musical ideas but in the power of music.

It always struck me as incredible that the austere aesthetic statement of the Sonata makes for Barraque's "opus one". Other pieces like Sequence or the Concerto are much more user friendly (but are no less powerfully expressive). Perhaps that makes the Sonata even more unique.

Herbert Henck attacks the piece with abandon. This is the recording of the sonata to get (avoid the Litwin interpretation on CPO).

Serialist intervention
The "Sonata" is an extraordinary twelve-tone work, adhering to the formalities and strict structural components that define serialism. Filled with jagged rhythms and acute harmonic developments, composer Jean Barraque blends together a spectrum of music. Alongside the likes of Pierre Boulez, Henri Dutilleux, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Barraque's compositional complexities are equally as daunting to a performer as his counterparts experimental works were. Influenced by Arnold Schoenbergs' atonal inventions, Barraque set out to explore serial compositional techniques to bring his own unique voice to the fore of the genre. This work combines the use of rigid and free tempi, alternating registers in the tone row. This basic form, having determined the pitch structure of the entire work, lies in the use of juxtaposing slower sections with faster ones, and vice versa. Motives are controlled with mathematical precision, hiding in swift rhythmic alterations, and retrograde inversion. This balance in contrast is consistent, with pianist Herbert Henck performing with critical attention to every detail. A composition seldomly recorded, Hencks' interpretation will be hailed as one of the finest. Pure, and full of adventure, the "Sonata" ranks among one of the most demanding serial works for piano produced in the 20th century.