It sometimes seems as if Pierre Boulez has spent a lifetime paying the penalty for having found composition so easy as a young man. The first two piano sonatas, works of his early twenties, are formidably assured in technique and tremendously rich in ideas. Those sections of the Third Sonata released for performance sound cold and tentative by comparison. Or is it that the Third Sonata's much more extreme rejection of tradition is itself a triumph, an authentic modernity that stands out the more prominently when so much else in contemporary music favours compromise and conformity?
Such thoughts are inspired by Idil Biret's absorbing new disc. At first I wondered if she might be in danger of exaggerating the contrasts in the First Sonata's first movement, but the broader picture proves to be well fleshed-out, the argument kept on the move, the young composer's impatience and arrogance palpable in Biret's steely touch and the rather dry but never merely harsh recorded sound. The Second Sonata is no less confidently done. While not superseding Pollini's magisterial account, this is a strong alternative, not least in those passages in the second and fourth movements where a strange kind of atonal Debussian reflectiveness can be heard.
Is it in the Second Sonata's remarkably diverse finale that premonitions of the Third Sonata's rejections of continuity begin to appear? Quite possibly – and yet the immense power of the Second Sonata as a whole suggests why such experiments as No. 3 represents could never be a last word for Boulez. This disc is not the first to let us hear the three sonatas together, and Claude Helffer's has many virtues. But Biret's musical persuasiveness, and the up-to-date sound, earn this Naxos issue a strong recommendation.'