From Amazon.co.uk
Rituel is that rare phenomenon: a contemporary work that those who've heard it will actually admit to liking--and not just because its fashionable! Written in memory of the composer and conductor
Bruno Maderna, it has a monumentality and grandeur more akin to Messiaen than Boulez. The music grows inevitably out of a series of instrumental groups, with a percussion backdrop dominated by the ceremonial sound of gongs--complex in theory but powerfully direct in performance. Written in 1975 it marks the effective end of the international avant-garde as the collective groundbreaker in Western music. If this is, in retrospect, a requiem for the "movement", it's a sincere and moving one. Judge for yourself, then listen to the typically Boulezian sensuality of
Eclat: a nine-minute journey through sound and silence of exquisite subtlety. The continuation,
Multiples, may well not progress beyond what you hear on this disc, in which case this torso will remain of absorbing interest. Authoritative performances, with an edge Boulez might well now avoid.
--Richard Whitehouse
