Boulez, Pierre - Piano Sonatas / Rituel / Notations

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For a young composer considered as being 'avant-garde' to write piano sonatas in the years following the last world war would seem to suggest either amnesia or provocation. As the major form of instrumental music for centuries, linked in its origin and development to the tonal system, always renewing the challenge of treating the instrument as something which it is not - namely a melody instrument - the keyboard sonata would seem to have exhausted itself spiritually, musically or technically. The pre-war attempts to revive the form - by Prokofiev and Bartók - might seem worthy, beautiful or attractive: but they did nothing to advance a form which since its conception (with C. P. E. Bach, Haydn) had on the contrary been defined by its capacity for evolution.Henceforth the advances in music history took place elsewhere. All the same, you may say, the piano itself was far from dead. Both before and after Boulez, composers have continued to have recourse to it. Contemporary music will not wreak such devastation as to refuse to admit this piece of nineteenth-century furniture to its ensembles or as a soloist. In this domain, however, the work of Boulez is different: exacting in a different way.