The title of Tamara Stefanovich’s latest release, Organised Delirium, comes originally from the writer Antonin Artaud. It was often quoted by Pierre Boulez as a way of conveying what he sought to achieve in his early works, and in particular with reference to his Second Piano Sonata, composed in 1947-48, which provides the focal point of this coruscating disc.
Stefanovich was able to study the sonata with Boulez, and her dazzling performance conveys a sense of total command and authority in every bar. Her mastery of the extreme technical demands of the piano writing one quickly takes as read, but the way in which she shapes and directs the turmoil of the outer movements, clarifying their swirling counterpoint as much as she can, is exceptional. Boulez himself described the sonata as having an “explosive, disintegrating and dispersive character”, and admitted that its first movement was an attempt to destroy sonata form, but Stefanovich shows that it is much more than an essay in musical destruction; there’s a passion beneath the seething textures and a tension between expressiveness and technical rigour that emerges more potently in this interpretation than in any other recording.
Of the three other 20th-century sonatas in this collection, all composed in the 1920s, it’s Bartók’s that comes closest to matching the Boulez in stature, and to some extent in its feral fierceness. Hanns Eisler’s Piano Sonata No 1 was composed in 1923 just as Eisler was finishing his studies with Schoenberg; he thought it good enough to be designated as his Op 1. Its language veers between free atonality and a chromaticism that seems reluctant to leave tonal music behind altogether. The quirky, brittle textures are sometimes close to those of Shostakovich’s First Sonata, which was completed in 1926, and which represents his first serious engagement with modernism; Stefanovich’s performances of both works have a tremendous athleticism and clarity. She adds a coda to this hugely impressive release, too: Domenico Scarlatti’s B minor Sonata K87, exquisite and serene after the fury of everything before it.
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