Thirty-six minutes? Yes, but the quantity of notes Yuji Takahashi has to negotiate in that time is colossal, and anyway the 'historical significance' of the pieces chosen could hardly be greater. Messiaen's Four Studies, in particular the ''Mode de valeurs et d'intensites'', were the key to the Pandora's box of total serialism, which Boulez, Stockhausen and other then gleefully threw open.
The significance of ''Mode'' goes deeper than the purely technical, however. Not even in the headiest days of prolation canon or troped dodecaphony had an established composer so wholeheartedly embraced the principle of 'what if...'; and never had the performer been offered so little room for manoeuvre.
Yet there is scope for interpretation, and not just in the more freely composed ''Ile de feu'' studies. Dynamics and characteristics of attack are not rigidly definable anyhow, and the unique qualities of an instrument and an acoustic challenge the player to regulate these elements according to an ideal of sound quality which must be more or less subjective. Paul Jacobs (Nonesuch H71334, 3/77—nla) manages to make ''Mode de valeurs'' a ravishing study in sonority; he finds exultation in the ''Ile de feu'' pieces and an impressive sense of perspective in ''Neumes rhythmiques''. Takahashi is recorded much more closely in a minimally resonant acoustic. He plays a fraction straighter, at times a fraction less cleanly it must be said, and altogether more impersonally—which may well be the more authentic approach, unattractive though it is for the listener.
The 'logical operations' in Xenakis's Herma could be viewed as one outcome of Messiaen's experiments; apart from which the piece has become a locus classicus for extravagant demands on pianistic virtuosity. The title apparently means ''bond, foundation, embryo'', etc., and Evryali connotes ''vast and tempestuous oceans, the moon as it traverses the sky and the beautiful Medusa with her hair of writhing snakes''. In both cases the meal proves less exciting than the menu. Herma at least sustains interest through its athleticism and more or less clear textural categories. Takahashi, its dedicatee and supreme exponent, knocks 35 seconds off Georges Pludermacher's timing (on Angel S3655—not generally obtainable in the UK) and avoids, so far as I can tell, the latter's misreadings, although some splashes in the high treble confirm that even he is human. Evryali starts off like a whacky minimalist commentary on ragtime—Conlon Nancarrow comes to mind—but it lacks the sharp focus of Xenakis's recent work and lasts a very long ten minutes.
If value judgement is genuinely of less relevance to these pieces than the observation of processes, I would have welcomed more detailed exposition than Takahashi's own short programme notes. If on the other hand an example was required of radical innovation yielding music of real communicative power in the 1970s, I would have nominated Ferneyhough's Lemma-Icon-Epigram. But that's another story.'