Surely a patrician French conductor, an accomplished orchestra and two excellent singers doing French impressionist music would amount to a buy-without-hearing on a visit to the record store. Wouldn't they?

Nope.

Pierre Boulez, like Glenn Gould, represents the musical equivalent of post-modern deconstructionist philosophy. He has ardent admirers and people who loathe him.(See the Quotes section of the Boulez Project). Boulez and Gould share the same cerebral approach to music. Each to some degree attempts to strip away our preconceptions to make us look afresh at well-known music. Boulez is worlds apart from his compatriot Charles Dutoit, the former lean, the latter lush. Is it too lean?

To many of us French music is intensely colourful as well as classical and intellectual. The ideal is to combine both. Unfortunately this disk errs on the side of the intellectual alone. None of the pieces touch us. Surely the playing is always precise, letting us hear details that are missing from other comparable performances. It is therefore pedagogically worthwhile but not, I am afraid, worthwhile for the pleasure of the pieces in themselves.

Take the Shéhérazade, for example. Sung by mezzo Anne Sofie von Otter in a rather undramatic thin voice, one can hear all the parts clearly and cleanly played but not once is one ushered into the story telling world of the Arabian Nights. Le Tombeau is more successful but again it lacks Ravel’s obvious emotional delight in resetting the baroque into the modern. Soprano Alison Hagley joins Boulez in Le Jet d’eau and the Trois Ballades. Her voice, darker than von Otter’s, is admirable but once again the collaboration lacks emotional intensity. I also found the orchestra on occasion too harsh. This, of course, is what Boulez sets out to do but does one want to rehear music dissected rather than felt? Are not Ravel and Debussy also subtle and seductive?

- Bill Riley