Organised Delirium is pianist Tamara Stefanovich’s personal exploration of the sonata form, centred around Boulez’s Piano Sonata no.2 which she studied in close collaboration with the composer, reigniting her passion as a performer. Boulez’s Piano Sonata no.2 represents a restructuring of music after its destruction during World War II.

Boulez’s iconoclast piece is paired with twentieth-century sonatas by Eisler, Bartók and Shostakovich, each questioning the use of the term ‘sonata’, while the programme closes with a return the sonata's origins by way of Domenico Scarlatti. Appearing in the context of Boulez’s centenary, this adventurous album reveals a strong kinship to Stefanovich’s PENTATONE debut Influences (2019), and deepens our understanding of the sonata, its history and its many shapes.

The New York Times lauded Tamara's recent concert performance of Boulez’s Piano Sonata no.2, stating that “Ms. Stefanovich’s performance was staggeringly brilliant”. Praised by The Guardian as “fearless, dazzling, exceptional”, Tamara Stefanovich is one of today’s most adventurous and sought-after pianists. After Influences (2019), Visions (2022) and Nicolaou - Etudes & Frames (2023), she now releases her fourth PENTATONE album.

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Boulez: Piano Sonata No.2: I. Extrèmement rapide
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Boulez: Piano Sonata No.2: II. Lent
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Boulez: Piano Sonata No.2: III. Modéré
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Boulez: Piano Sonata No.2: IV. Vif
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Eisler: Piano Sonata No.1, op.1: I. Allegro
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Eisler: Piano Sonata No.1, op.1: II. Andante con moto
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Eisler: Piano Sonata No.1, op.1: III. Allegro
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Bartók: Piano Sonata, BB88, Sz.80: I. Allegro moderato
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Bartók: Piano Sonata, BB88, Sz.80: II. Sostenuto e pesante
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Bartók: Piano Sonata, BB88, Sz.80: III. Allegro molto
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Shostakovich: Piano Sonata No.1, op.12
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Scarlatti: Sonata in B minor, K87

Europadisc Review

Later this month the musical world marks the centenary of the birth of Pierre Boulez, one of the most consequential and influential figures in postwar 20th-century modernism. Whether as composer, conductor or director of organisations, nine years after his death Boulez may continue to divide opinion, yet the scale of his influence on contemporary classical music is impossible to ignore. One of his more recent champions is pianist Tamara Stefanovich, and for her latest album on the Pentatone label she takes Boulez’s monumental Second Piano Sonata (1948) as the starting point for an exploration of the ways in which four 20th-century composers responded to the challenges of writing in the sonata genre. The disc is entitled ‘Organised Delirium’, a term taken from the radical French actor Antonin Artaud which Boulez liked to quote when explaining the parallel forces of order and chaos which characterise the music he composed in his early 20s.

The tension between order and chaos was especially attractive to this young French composer attempting to find a way forward after living through the most destructive war in human history, an experience which shaped the radicalism of a whole generation of composers. More specifically, the Second Sonata meets the challenges of the genre by ‘forc[ing] the listeners to participate’ in a process of ‘destruction’: not his later (and now notorious) suggestion to ‘blow up’ opera houses, but a ‘dismantling’ of music’s motivic-thematic structure. In this four-movement work lasting some 35 minutes, the ghost of the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata by the arch-motivicist Beethoven hovers in the background – most obviously in the fugue that emerges obscurely from the depths of the last movement.

For all this Sonata’s reputation as a locus classicus of postwar modernism, there’s a seething, tumultuous passion and, in the slower passages (particularly the second movement, but also the hiatuses and coda of the first and the ‘trios’ of the third), a disarming fluidity that Stefanovich brings out like no other performer on disc. She has clearly taken to heart the hours of working on the piece under Boulez himself, including many surprisingly poetic suggestions. Yet her technical prowess in a work of immense physical challenges is second to none, and both the boldness and the beauty of the work emerge newly-minted. Almost half a century ago, Maurizio Pollini recorded what is now regarded as a classic performance of the Sonata for DG: this is undoubtedly its worthy successor, captured in wonderful immediacy yet with just the right degree of sonic warmth.

Following this magnificent ‘centre point of ignition’ (Stefanovich’s own words) come three sonatas written just a quarter of a century earlier, in the febrile interwar years. Hanns Eisler’s First Piano Sonata, op.1 (1923), was dedicated to his teacher Schoenberg, and pays obvious tribute in the free atonality of the fast outer movements, while Stefanovich’s nuanced voicing brings out all the characterfulness of the gawky central Andante. Just as involving is her incisive account of Béla Bartók’s Piano Sonata (1926), a work with which the composer broke a creative impasse, where she taps unerringly into the folk-like earthiness and sharply-etched rhythms. Particularly notable amid the virtuosic swirls is the way in which she brings out the music’s multi-layered registral contrasts – such as the long-held notes in the middle texture of the first movement – and the increasingly frenetic dance impulses of the third.

Another work from 1926 is the one-movement First Piano Sonata, op.12, by Dmitri Shostakovich, the 50th anniversary of whose death also falls this year. Following just a few months after the accessibly neo-classical First Symphony (which was an immediate success), the Sonata confounded expectations. With its harsh dissonances and extremes of dynamics, expression and tempo contrasts, it remains Shostakovich’s fullest engagement with the atonality of the period. Stefanovich gives a performance that combines athleticism, clarity and coruscating poetry, never ducking the music’s hard-edged virtuosity, but also bringing out its passages of Scriabinesque mystery.

This deeply stimulating album is brought to a close by a work from some two centuries earlier still, by the ‘founder’ of the piano sonata: Domenico Scarlatti. His Sonata in B minor, K87, lowers the temperature, certainly in terms of dynamic and emotional extremes, yet this is an intensely thoughtful reading which matches the concentration levels of the disc as a whole. For those in search of something beyond the conventional piano sonata fare, Tamara Stefanovich’s new disc is endlessly fascinating, with levels of virtuosity and musical maturity to match. In short: strongly recommended!

Reviews

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. ... 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. Andrew Clememts

The Guardian 7 March 2025

In her booklet comments, Tamara Stefanovich recalls playing Boulez’s Second Sonata for the composer, and how he conducted her playing using ‘generous visionary gestures, always showing where and how to ride the waves of drama’. Such long-lined flexibility informs her recorded performance. ... Stefanovich strives to convey the musicality beneath the manifesto, so to speak. She gives the phrases room to breath and congeal, while shaping the stabbing trills rather than shoehorning them in pursuit of metronomic rectitude, uncovering melodic signposts in the process. ... While Stefanovich faces more incendiary catalogue competition in Bartók’s Sonata (Zoltán Kocsis, Goran Filipec, Murray Perahia and Martha Argerich), few orchestrate the piano-writing so well. ... Likewise, Shostakovich’s early Piano Sonata No 1 receives an intelligently paced and respectful reading that doesn’t foam at the mouth or overshoot its climaxes in the manner of pianists who treat this music like Prokofiev on steroids. Jed Distler

Gramophone April 2025

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Condition	Description
New	Brand new item, only ever sourced from the official UK distributor. Usually seal-wrapped, although a minority of labels do not use seal-wrap.
Used - Mint	Used item in excellent condition. Not usually seal-wrapped.
Used - Good	Used item with some minor signs of wear and tear. Never seal-wrapped.
Used - Acceptable	Used item with obvious scuffs or cosmetic damage to the case or booklet. Never seal-wrapped.

Organised Delirium: Boulez, Eisler, Bartok, Shostakovich, D Scarlatti

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