Boulez's two cantatas are often spoken of as a pair, if only because both set texts by Rene Char, but the composer's revising process has underlined the differences between them. Le visage nuptial, the earlier but the more extensively reworked, strikes me at this stage of acquaintance as probably a noble failure. I would give a great deal to hear its original, more lightly-scored version, but even in that I suspect it would be hard to avoid the sensation of being submerged by the sheer weight of words. Char's elaborately surrealist meditation on love and loss seductively invites musical setting, yet it is so intricately patterned as to reduce music to a state of lumbering irrelevance. When words themselves strive so hard for musical effects there is no room for the real thing.
In Le soleil des eaux Boulez tackled a very different Char. The lyrical delicacy of the first movement almost raises the unlikely but delightful prospect of an atonal Reynaldo Hahn, and even the more voluble second movement is bound tightly together by increasingly dramatic repetitions of the word ''riviere'', which Boulez exploits with great cumulative power until the marvellous dying fall. Both performances, as one would expect from the well-tried partnership of composer, favoured soloists and BBC forces, are dedicated, authoritative and full of musical insight, while the recordings of all three works on the disc project a strong feeling for the wide-ranging spaces within which the music moves.
Figures—Doubles—Prismes (recorded in 1985) is a 20-minute orchestral composition that begins by circling around its material rather grimly, but with a well-articulated certainty of purpose that gradually admits lighter textures and a livelier mood. This process of change eventually generates the extreme contrast of quieter, sustained music that, for Boulez, sounds almost serene. I would have been happy for the work to end with this material, rather than with the dissipatory violence that Boulez restores in the last couple of minutes, but this ending is characteristic of him in its rejection of what threatens to become an idealized, sensuous conclusion. In such ways Boulez remains faithful to the unsentimental message of Le visage nuptial, and you can understand his desire to reinvigorate and not simply reject that early, disquieting outpouring of creative ambition.'