Though I am, in general, a fan, it's surprising that it's been nine years since Boulez the Composer last appeared here. I recently had a discussion with a friend of mine (a Boulez aficionado) about the merits of Boulez's recordings of his own most famous work, Le marteau sans maître, which he officially recorded five times, and thought it would be nice to visit this landmark.

Perhaps the best-known recording is the second one, with Jeanne Deroubaix singing. There is a lot of reverb/echo on the recording, but it is miles ahead of the first recording in terms of accuracy and musicality. My friend's favorite is the third recording, with Yvonne Minton, which is, indeed, excellent. It is accurate the whole way through, and not as frenetic as the Deroubaix recording. The recording quality itself is also excellent.

I like the Minton recording a lot, but I am lately enamored with the fifth recording, with Hilary Summers singing. It is, on the whole, significantly slower than the other recordings; in some spots, so much so, that it pushes the tempo nearly to the breaking point. But in many passages it works very well this way. (I don't mean to imply that there are no fast passages, merely that it is generally slow in comparison to all other performances). A case in point is the sixth movement, excerpted here, where every relationship of attack, timbre, pitch, dynamic, etc., is clear as crystal and the listener has time to process and luxuriate in the changing sonic landscape. The shared b-flat between the flute and the voice at the voice's first entrance, the change in the viola from forte A to piano harmonic A at the end of that same phrase, the timbral associations between the clink of the xylorimba and vibraphone and the pluck of the guitar — all come through in immediately identifiable relationships. And, naturally, these are just a few surface examples.