Feasts of many hues

Pierre Boulez

Pierre Boulez has just turned 80 and it is difficult to believe that this grand and generous old man of music once advocated the torching of opera houses.

While he doesn't like the word "mellowing", Boulez does admit he is less aggressive. "When you are young," as he puts it, "you are like a dog barking outside the house to make people aware you are outside. Later, you don't need to bark because you are in the house."

The music of Boulez need hold no terrors for those with open ears and minds. Although he himself now laughs at early mathematical intricacies carried "to the point of absurdity", even his most intellectual scores are never less than feasts of colour.

Most of the international composers who contributed to the Guardian's Boulez tribute two months ago went into raptures over Boulez' soundworld. American John Adams was the only one to disagree, dismissing him as "a niche composer and a master who worked with a very small hammer".

Perhaps the Frenchman's three piano sonatas are just the works to fuel Adams' ire but, if so, how is it that all three have been recorded by names like Maurizio Pollini, Charles Rosen and Idil Biret, pianists who have made their reputations with the more traditional three Bs - Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.

In 2005, there is certainly no more bewitching account of the sonatas than that of the young Finnish pianist Paavali Jumppanen, whose CD of all three is one of five birthday salutes for Boulez from Deutsche Grammophon.

Jumppanen, who took Boulez' music to Australian concert stages last year, has the balance of translucence and pointillism spot on.

A second CD puts the pithy virtuosics of the 1945 Notations, played by pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, alongside the all-encompassing resonance of the two-piano Structures. A third has Welsh mezzo Hilary Summers, so impressive in a recent recording of Michael Haydn's Requiem, illuminating the highly coloristic Le Marteau sans Maitre.

Although we have been deprived of much Boulez on our concert programmes, Marteau did make the bill when Boulez visited Wellington for the Second International Festival of the Arts in 1988, along with his Ensemble Intercontemporain.

Not only were works by Ligeti, Stockhausen, Schoenberg and others performed, but the Frenchman conducted a workshop for New Zealand composers.

Eve de Castro-Robinson remembers him as elegant in a pale green, well-tailored linen suit and she was expecting a casual read-through when he took up the baton for her Interpolations. It wasn't.

"I have never seen a man with such fine ears and musical style and know-how," De Castro-Robinson recalls, "let alone close up and working on my piece."

De Castro-Robinson can still hear Boulez whistling a chord for the woodwinds to pitch to - "I have perfect pitch, trust me" - and says how he ever so charmingly suggested that her piece could do with a tempo upgrade: "I will take this faster, no?"

The remaining Deutsche Grammophon discs focus on Boulez the conductor.

A collection of three Mahler songcycles lets us marvel at the supple lines of baritone Thomas Quasthoff in Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen or be utterly spellbound by Anne Sofie von Otter's Kindertotenlieder.

Boulez has recently described how Mahler brought the essence of Proustian narrative into music. Von Otter and Quasthoff are superb storytellers.

In the final CD, Boulez allots each of Bartok's three piano concertos to a specific soloist and orchestra, and it is a fascinating study of differences. Krystian Zimmermann and the Chicago Symphony deal out primal fire in the first concerto and Leif Ove Andsnes trades finely wrought arguments with the Berlin Philharmonic in the second. The third - a work which, in younger days, Boulez dismissed as slight - is inspirationally delivered by Helene Grimaud and the London Symphony.

* Boulez, The Three Piano Sonatas (Deutsche Grammophon 477 5328)

Boulez, Explosante Fixe (Deutsche Grammophon 477 5385)

Boulez conducts Boulez (Deutsche Grammophon 477 5327)

Mahler, Lieder (Deutsche Grammophon BOO03894 02)

Bartok, Piano Concertos 1-3 (Deutsche Grammophon 477 5330)