After sur Incises, Dérive 2 (1988/2002) is Boulez’s most extended recent work. Like sur Incises, it is a sonic firework display in which three groups of relatively homogenous tone colours – wind quartet (cor anglais, clarinet, bassoon and horn), string trio, and a second quartet comprising vibraphone, marimba- phone, harp and piano – converge and diverge in an absorbing Dionysian ritual. Indeed, about three minutes from the end of this 25-minute score it sounds as if Boulez is consciously alluding to the celebratory bell-ringing that concludes Stravinsky’s Les Noces. Nevertheless, and characteristically, this brief flirtation with nostalgia is swept away in a fiercely abrupt denouement, restoring the music’s predominantly abrasive, exuberant spirit.

Apart from the brief Dérive 1 for six instruments – from which, the notes assure us, Dérive 2 is not derived – this CD is notable for a new recording of Le Marteau sans maître: a score now half a century old and sounding more urgently volatile than ever in this superbly crafted performance. This is, by my reckoning, Boulez’s fifth recording of the work, and the first since the 1985 CBS version with Elizabeth Lawrence and the Ensemble Intercontemporain (10/89). This time Hilary Summers brings a highly effective quality of the farouche, as well as considerable finesse, to the vocal part: but, as often before, the thunder is stolen by the superbly characterised instrumental playing. Flute, guitar and viola are never overshadowed by the more resonant sounds of the percussion duo, and there’s the kind of edge-of-the-seat interplay which can only be achieved by players who have the music in their bones as well as under their fingers. As for the final duet for flute and metal percussion, this stands out for its incantatory gravitas, and for the hint of un-Gallic pathos that underpins its eloquence. It might not please the great composer/conductor to realise it, but Le Marteau has become a modern classic.

With the finest present-day sound quality, this DG release is outstanding in every way. Yet it still risks being upstaged by the super-budget-price Apex reissue of four of Boulez’s most imposing earlier works. True, the 1981 Pli selon pli doesn’t give you his most recent thoughts on this endlessly-evolving ‘portrait de Mallarmé’ – for that you need the definitive DG account from 2002 (7/02). But this BBC version remains a very satisfying document of its time, and a special strength of the set as a whole is the vividness with which it demonstrates what has been lost in Boulez’s complete abandonment of writing for the voice since the 1980s.

The large-scale cantata Le visage nuptial, originally composed in 1946, but performed here in the revised version from 1988-89, has an expressive incandescence and a sustained dramatic power that not only reconcile you to René Char’s convoluted verse but provoke the thought that Boulez might, after all, be contemporary music’s greatest opera composer manqué. Back in 1990, I described it as ‘probably a noble failure’, but this time round the ‘nobility’ – not the most appropriate word for so subversively dynamic a score – asserts itself irresistibly, in a supremely confident, polished performance: I doubt if the BBC Singers have ever done anything finer on disc.

More subversive dynamism can be heard in the expansive, eruptive monumentality of the orchestral Figures, Doubles, Prismes, strikingly enigmatic in its commitment to strongly sustained oppositions, and bringing back the composer’s own 1985 reading to set beside the recent version from David Robertson and the Lyon National Orchestra (Naïve Montaigne, 10/03). Add to all this the fascinating feline glitter of Le soleil des eaux and you have a ‘portrait de Boulez’ of exceptional quality.