Pierre Boulez - Improvisations Sur Mallarmé I & II

All Music Guide

This composition, together with "Le Marteau Sans Maitre" (The Hammer Without a Master), established the particular sound of Boulez's approach to serialist composition, a poetic pointillism with a Debussy-ian sense of timbres, which has characterized most of his works, and is more interesting than most of the later rather arid pieces that followed it. This CD also contains two lovely classics of 12-tone music (upon which serialism is based) by Arnold Schöenberg ("Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21") (1912) and Anton Webern ("5 Canons on Latin Texts") for soprano and instrumental ensemble, op. 16 (1923-24) and two of his songs.

- "Blue" Gene Tyranny, All Music Guide