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.
