Will Boulez record Pli selon pli a third time with one of his currently preferred American orchestras in Chicago or Cleveland? As his longest complete composition to date, this 'portrait of Mallarmé' seems more and more like a definitive testament to that peculiarly French kind of expressionism which Boulez has made his own, and it is already 15 years since his second recording, with Phyllis Bryn-Julson and the BBC SO, indicated a more expansive approach to its intricately woven textures, and to the tensions and balances that can be found between its strongly contrasted movements. The earlier CBS/Sony version, now reissued on CD for the first time, has a special historical status as embodying the composer's view of the work near the time of its actual completion, when forcefulness, and even ferocity, seemed to count for more as foils to the music's moments of relative restraint than the sustained densities so strongly emphasized in the second recording. Even if you have the later disc, this one is of great significance, and its value is enhanced by the addition of the potently expressive Livre pour cordes. This is only a part of what Boulez intends as a complete recasting of his youthful .work for string quartet, and, as it happens, the first of the two movements we hear in this recording was superseded in 1989 by another reworking, as yet unrecorded. Such are the delights and frustrations of the Boulez project: fortunately he has not forbidden reissue of this initial and far from negligible version of Livre.

-- Gramophone [7/1996]