Piano Sonata (Barraqué)


The Piano Sonata by Jean Barraqué, composed between 1950 and 1952, is a significant serial composition, from the period of avant-garde composition in France shortly after World War II. It is a large piece, lasting around forty minutes according to the score, but ranging from 30 to 50 minutes in recordings attended by the composer. It is in a single movement divided into two connected sections, roughly equal in length.

Influences

The densely dissonant polyphonic texture of the work resembles the Second Piano Sonata of Pierre Boulez, a work Barraqué knew well. In performance, however, the overall impact is quite different from anything of Boulez, and has often been claimed, to be akin in spirit to the late sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven.
In its turn, Barraqué's Sonata spurred his pupil Bill Hopkins to compose his cycle of Etudes en Série, which develops some of Barraqué's serial techniques, and its scale, but has its own musical characteristics.

Structure

has written of the music of the sonata: 'contrasts of themes or keys are replaced by other polarities, in particular between perceptions of notes as sounds and as tones, between freedom and fixity in the registral placing of notes, between pulsed and pulseless rhythm and between sound and silence. In his preface to the composition Barraqué drew attention to another opposition, between a "free style" of motifs and chords in easy flow and a "strict style" of intensive, quasi-automatic process acknowledging the total serialism of the time. Compulsion, embodied in the strict music, may seem to spur protest in the free passages. But protest is compromised by having to be voiced in the same language, based on the same series.' Herbert Henck has also noted: 'The overall structure was based on juxtaposing a fast movement with a slow one of equal weight. But as the fast movement built up, slow sections were increasingly introduced, and the slow movement contained some fast ones, so that there was a balance of contrasts within the work as a whole. The piece closed in unison in a mediating tempo with a twelve-tone row, whose basic form determined the pitch structure of the whole work.'

Performance History

The sonata was recorded commercially by Yvonne Loriod between 28 and 30 October 1957 and issued in 1958. This recording was made in the presence of the composer, and from the manuscript, which was corrected and modified by the composer during the sessions. It was not given its first performance in public until 24 April 1967, when the Danish pianist Elisabeth Klein played it in a recital in Copenhagen, seemingly unaware that she was in fact giving the world première.
The Sonata was subsequently recorded commercially by Claude Helffer in 1969 and Roger Woodward in 1972, both also in the presence of the composer. A concert recording from 1972 by Francoise Thinat, prepared with the composer, has also been released on CD.
The new critical edition of the Sonata by Heribert Henrich was given its first performance from an early draft, in 2012 in Berlin, by Nicolas Hodges. The concert also included the world premiere by Hodges of Barraqué's juvenile piano works and songs. The new edition was given its first recording by Jean-Pierre Collot in 2018, release 2019.

Published editions

The Sonata had been published by Aldo Bruzzichelli, Florence in 1966; the rights have since transferred to Bärenreiter-Verlag of Kassel. The original edition is rife with notational errors, and some performers made extensive corrections. In 2019 however, the long-awaited critical edition by Heribert Henrich was published by Bärenreiter.
Woodward worked extensively with Barraqué before his recording. There are photographs, some of which were reproduced in the booklet of Woodward's CD, showing Barraqué and Woodward in two different settings, one working together at a desk and the other one working together in a recording studio with Woodward at the keyboard and Barraqué standing near, talking. Woodward's notes on his recording tell the story in great detail.