When Jean Barraqué died suddenly in 1973, at the age of 45, he left a legacy of just seven acknowledged works. A study of 20th-century music, published in 1961, had made enormous claims for his significance, suggesting he would become the greatest composer of the second half of the 20th century, but neither during his lifetime, nor in the almost half a century since, have those claims been reflected in performances of his music, which are rare.
Barraqué seems destined to remain one of the most mysterious figures in that generation of radical composers, led by Pierre Boulez, who attended Messiaen’s classes at the Paris Conservatoire in the years after the second world war.
The Barraqué work that does receive occasional performances is his massive Piano Sonata, composed between 1950 and 1952, but which was not performed in public until 1967. Jean-Pierre Collot’s recording is at least the seventh version of this hugely challenging piece to make it on to disc, and despite its shortcomings, it does provide a vivid reminder of what an extraordinary work the sonata is, one of the great achievements of total serialism.
Clearly indebted to Boulez’s Second Sonata, composed two years before it, it’s just as potently modelled on Beethoven’s Hammerklavier, so that its epic sense of struggle between fast and slow, notes and silence, engages the listener rather than keeping them at a distance.
Though Collot’s performance leaves something to be desired – for all its fluency, it sometimes seems far too fast and slick (it is more than 15 minutes quicker than the version included in the 1998 CPO set of Barraqué’s complete works, and eight minutes faster than Herbert Henck’s superb account on ECM) – he does play some of the piano pieces that Barraqué composed before the sonata, in the late 1940s, which were suppressed in his lifetime. They show him gradually adapting serial language to his own fiercely personal expressive ends, and so colour in just a few more details of the emergence of this profoundly elusive composer.
Also out this week
Cantéyodjayâ, the stand-alone piano piece that Messiaen composed during the period in which Barraqué was attending his classes, is one of the highlights on Tamara Stefanovich’s new recital disc for Pentatone. Her sequence begins with Ives’s Piano Sonata No 1 (far less well known than his second, the Concord Sonata, but just as uncompromising), and goes on to Bartók’s acerbic Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs and the Messiaen, before finally finding some repose in a gem-like account of JS Bach’s rarely heard Aria Variata alla Maniera Italiana. It’s an exciting, challenging collection, delivered with fabulous clarity and brilliance.
