Pierre Boulez's solo keyboard output remains heavily weighted in favor of the most radical, intransigent phase of his development — his twenties — although it is no coincidence that these were also his most productive, self-assured years as a composer. As Charles Rosen, one of Boulez’s important early interpreters, observed, the piano “is a traditional outlet for experimentation: it allows an immediate control over the musical idea,” one that “often indicates at once the nature of the revolution and suggests its limits.” Those limits would be reached in earnest with the unfinished Third Sonata, one of the essential termini of the postwar avant-garde project in its most “heroic” phase, and in many respects the decisive venture of Boulez’s creative life.

On these discs, Marc Ponthus plays all of Boulez's solo piano music, including the expanded 2001 version of Incises.