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The late Claude Helffer knew Boulez all his life playing in Paris in his groups there as well as the avant-garde repertoire.
TheseSonatas as a set are available on other labels as well, but Helffer's concept of these works are fairly one-dimensional, non-derogatorily, for what is music when you play it unless you transform, transcend it beyond what may be conveyed to you within the four corners of the page.
The trouble is that Helffer played these works long prior to anyone else, and generally adopts the "irrational" side to these works.He does so with other composer as Xenakis at break-neck speeds. Arguably you can support this evidence for this repertoire for the avant-garde is suppose to entertain the pretension that it is at the "ends" of perceptions,or "seventh" door as in Bluebeard's Castle. The first two Sonatas mark new territory for piano timbre, although the piano language is indebted to Messiaen. But Boulez has many cards to play beyond that. These were written during or not long after WW 2 so European culture was under some forms of cultural demise. There was a ellipsis of culture, in that hardly almost nothing contemporary was heard.
The First Sonata is fairly beautiful with the cross surface dimensions of the sustained intervals, the clipped chord as a punctuation,thelow register gong-like timbres contrasted with the fastly clipped arpeggiations,as well as the linear pointillisms that were to become the avant-garde's primary language until the late Fifties. The First Sonata inhabits two movements, the first exposing these two contrasting gestures the sustained and the pointill melos; the intervals deployed contract around the minor sixth, the major ninth,an inversions; it has a transparent beauty within the context of this pointillistic surfaces its also entertains incredible raw brutal gestures ringing the piano almost uncontrollably. This "over the edge" then saw even more gratuitous expansions in the Second Sonata,now a full-tilt Listzian recepticle, although it has less extrovert-ise-isms in the almost Surreal third movement, more sparce, opaque actually with deeply angular unclangorous lines,more the poet here.Yes the fourth movment returns unvanquished. Helffer blizzes/blazes through all of this without too much definition of gestural management for my taste,it's all the same, FAST, and faster,and fastest;tres vif, vifement; you need to bring to bear some kind of planned gestures where the music acts like accumulated layers of itself of its own furioso/frenzied elements, In the Second the percussive power is a norm, the deeply clangorous metallic like tubular chimes always need some control of the piano timbres otherwise the work spins itself away from you.Maurizio Pollini seems to understand this, where he brings a kinbd of "electricity" to the proceedings, also quite fast,blazingly bright as well,yet always with some gesture to the endpoints of the phrase.Similarly I wish I could have heard the late David Tudor play this when he gave the USA premiere in New York City in the early Fifties.Tudor always brought a sense of the rhytmic clarity to the work extinguishing the trappings of "romanticized" gestures. The work should steer a course between these two modes of interpretation. Yvonne Loriod who also gave the European premiere rings uncompromisingly the clangorous elements of the work where other tend to reserve a place as Pollini and Rosen. Helffer is more interested in the absolute speed, the frenzied content,the overwroughtness of the works surfaces.This speed tends to make fodder out of Boulez's beautifully designed intervals, and cell-rhythmic motives where the work is structured from moment to moment encased in two large ideas the arpeggiated cell, the opening and the sustained chord the second idea,very much like Beethoven's Walstein Sonata.What Helffer does is arguably an integral part of the Boulez aesthetic even up to his late (always revised" works where there is always a "toccata-esque" gestures as his "Sur Incises", and the piano solo that was the template for the large work.So you have a point where the music seems to be falling apart yet tightly controlled.
The Third Sonata (unfinished) from the late Fifties we all know was an excursion into the indeterminate, the structural mobility,although Boulez's sensibility subverts the performative freedoms so much with numerous instructions, marginal suggestions,alternate readings of the materials and notes above the music's notational system,so overdetermined that the piece could well have been written out.The pianist gets to choose the pathways he or she is to play. Helffer here sees the beauty in the work,holds back in that more timbral "gears" need attention than the two previous Sonatas. The Third contains additional dimensions of timbre now with the use of all the piano's pedals, and different modes of attack, grace-notes,and piano harmonics.Also larger doses of pointillism(s) for their pure abstract beauty deployed as if in fragments, fragments of "blocs" and arpeggiations.
