The first thing to notice about the new 13-disc set of Pierre Boulez: Complete Works (DG) is the box itself. Not that it is black in a black-is-beautiful way, though once upon a time the gay critic John Ardoin and his publisher were chastised for issuing Ardoin's The Callas Legacy with a black-and-white cover while the diva was still alive (though not for long). No one thinks it's over for Boulez even though he is 88, has severe vision problems after an eye surgery, and recently broke his shoulder, a hardship for a conductor.
Turning the box over, the thing to notice is that the back cover makes no mention of "complete works," and above the listed contents, calls them "Works in Progress." You can tell this box by its covers. A relentless reviser of his compositions, Boulez has periodically withdrawn one or another of them from public scrutiny and performance for a period. (And a couple of early works appear, on evidence of the black cask, to have been consigned to the dustbin.) Others, never withheld, go on morphing over decades as the composer rethinks and refines them. This is not just fussiness or control-freakism. Few composers of the last century still living have made it their single-minded, unending mission to move music forward, and Boulez has made his own work Exhibit A in the evolution of music in his lifetime. None has been more damning of others he deemed weaker in that regard – or more severe in the demands he has placed on himself. For a mind and sensibility such as his, the work could never be done.
What makes Boulez a standout among the gay composers of his day is his complete break not only with Romanticism but, over time, with all prevailing forms of modernism. Billy Budd, Billy the Kid, Regina, Anthony and Cleopatra, Anita and Tony, even Marco Polo, don't live here anymore. It's hard to imagine anyone hearing a Boulez composition for the first time and then being surprised to learn that the composer was a mathematician first.
All of this could suggest what this splendid box of multicolored discs so soundly refutes: that this restless, calculated, endlessly refined music is, if not impenetrable, forbidding. And, despite all its permutations, somehow calcified, desiccated, bone-dry. What is revealed in work after work in this set, in which compositions are set in such chronological an order as Boulez's method allows, is how alive, fleet, liquid and electric yet crystalline in its shimmering beauty this finally fathomless music is.
Being in the space when Boulez led his hand-picked Ensemble Intercontemporain in Repons and Dialogue de l'ombre double for solo clarinet (CD 9 in this set, though they're different performances) in San Francisco in 1984 counts as one of the high points in my concert life. Except for the musicians, we all were hearing this music for the first time, yet there was no sense of having to surrender yourself to the unknown, so excitedly did the sounds and overtones come out to greet us in the lively acoustic.
The culmination of a great experience of Boulez's music is not the catharsis that one has, say, at the end of Mahler's Second Symphony or his Ninth (both of which Boulez the conductor can deliver, emotional release and all). It's more that of being taken to a place of heightened aesthetic experience that leaves you decidedly more present, rather than transported, molecules rearranged, cobwebs knocked out of your brain. Alive, even.
As you can be sure that Boulez had his hand in every decision made in preparing this collection, you can also be sure that each performance is positioned on the knife edge of perfection. Many will be grateful that the interview that comprises CD 13 appears in full in English in the exceptionally well-curated accompanying booklet.
Even the Boulez faithful will want the set for the few important items unavailable previously or elsewhere, including a final disc of historical performances: a Le Marteau sans maitre (considered by many to be his greatest or most lasting piece) from 1964, the 1950 version of Le Soleil des eaux, and a 1956 performance of the Sonatine for flute and piano. A live 2007 recording of Notations, for orchestra, makes its dazzling first appearance on CD. And two short pieces, "Improvise – pour le Dr. Kalmus" for five instruments, and "Une page d'ephemeride" for solo piano (Hideki Nagano), were recorded expressly for this set. A pianist himself, Boulez's fascination with the instrument is heard throughout the set, and to rather magical effect in this satisfying, five-minute work.
I seem finally to have been in the right mindset to engage fully with the 1989 "version definitive" of Pli selon pli , which until now I've only owned in the sense that it sits on my shelf. And I admit to being transfixed again by Messagesquisse, sur le nom de Paul Sacher, with the brilliant Jean-Guihen Queyras the solo cellist among six others. Next time I open the box, something else will take me.