This is the third recording of Pli selon pli, with the Ensemble InterContemporain expanded to 57 players, fitting the composer's definitive conception of the work as enhanced chamber music.
Moreover, this is in effect a first recording, since it incorporates the revisions which Boulez made to the first and fourth movements during the 1980s. The recording was, as he wryly notes, the result of assiduous preparation, with no insecurity or 'panic'. It's a remarkably polished, gravely expressive account, as if he now sees his 'portrait of Mallarmé' more as a ritual homage to the radical 19th-century poet than as a multivalent, urgent, even angry sketch of the kind of intran- sigent creativity that few of Boulez's contemporaries were committed to at the time of the work's genesis (1957-60). But, even without panic, there can be no such thing as a sanitised, lushly comforting Pli selon Pli. The music remains Boulez's most extended engagement with the modernist aesthetic.
The recording is technically immaculate, with the intricate tapestry woven around guitar, mandolin and harps and the labyrinthine interactions between families of flutes, horns and lower strings especially well managed. Christine Schäfer sings serenely and securely, with an admirable poetic presence. Although you can imagine other performances recapturing more of the score's original fire and fury, this is an imposing representation of a work which sums up the composer's vision of art and life in the years before he found his way to a viable electro-acoustic technique and a more stable view of musical structure.