Fast, Furious and in Control

When Einstein published his theory of relativity in 1905, it was reported that only 10 other scientists understood it. An exaggeration, of course, but it was obvious that this was a radically new way of thinking.

When Jean Barraque completed his Piano Sonata in 1952, certainly only a handful of musicians could have understood it. A massive work, typically lasting about 45 minutes, it intended to blast Beethoven into the Space Age. Its new thinking was, like Einstein’s, about the relative experience of time through complementary but nonsimultaneous events--mathematical structures and free ones, a cosmic encounter with confinement and liberation.

At least, that is what I think it is about. One difference between this French sonata and Einstein is that there are still very few people who can understand it. But it is a legendary challenge, and every now and then someone gets curious.

On Tuesday the venturesome record label ECM released a new recording of it by German pianist Herbert Henck. And Monday night, Marino Formenti performed it at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as the first of Monday Evening Concerts’ two-week festival “Four Nights of Piano,” a survey of 20th century music performed by this formidable, unforgettable 34-year-old Italian pianist.

Formenti is a player in whom elegance and controlled violence seem to spring from the same impulse. But here in the Barraque Sonata--in which deep meditations on radiant piano sonorities are interrupted by rapacious attacks on the keyboard--his performance was also unbelievably fast. This sonata has note values divided into brain-skewering complex fractions, and seemingly hundreds of thousands of these notes are scattered imperiously across the musical landscape like stars in the night sky. It is an enormous undertaking for any player. But Formenti, whose performance lasted exactly 23 minutes, played it in half the time the composer expected.

People see this sonata differently. In an influential book, “Since Debussy,” written in 1961, French critic Andre Hodeir suggested that with this sonata, written when the composer was 24 and just finishing his studies, Barraque already was on the path to becoming a composer “greater perhaps than the most towering geniuses of the past.” (Barraque died in 1973 and is now a cult figure in the history of the ultra-complex music of his era.) Henck’s recording takes a somber approach, treating the work as a vast granitic vision, a portentous exploration of hyperactivity and heart-stopping silences. Other performances have inspired talk of the profound revelations of boredom. The unsigned program notes Monday night likened the score’s extreme changeability to a Jackson Pollock painting.

Formenti, however, played it as gripping theater. He pounced upon it as if its gestures were a living language. It may not be a language we understand literally, but its power was evident, and explanation proved neither necessary nor desirable as Formenti moved the sonata from the realm of speculation to experience. We may not know roller-coaster physics, but we do know what it’s like to ride one.

Formenti also put the sonata into a context that made the ear ready for it. Each of his four programs is dedicated to a nationality. Monday was French music, and most of it contemporary with the Barraque. Boulez, who was a student with Barraque in Messiaen’s postwar classes in Paris, was represented by “Notations” from 1945--10 miniatures that are mainly known as the impetus for later orchestral pieces.

Also played were four of Messiaen’s “Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jesus” (Twenty Glances Upon the Child Jesus), including the sumptuous, high-caloric finale, a glance and then some on the “Church of Love,” which Messiaen wrote in 1944. More contemporary were the brief “Three Canons” by the young French composer Brice Pauset that investigate the indefinable shadows that sounds cast.

Formenti played everything with spectacular mastery. His tone is riveting, especially when he gets individual notes to ring with a sensual beauty. But he is also a supreme dramatist, able to keep a listener in high suspense, able to shock.

Anyone interested in the extreme capabilities of the piano or of the most modern art of the piano should not miss these challenging concerts. Thursday’s program focuses on Italian music, Austrian on May 1 and American May 4.

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* “Four Nights of Piano,” 7:30 p.m., Leo S. Bing Theater, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., $9-$15 (free for students with current ID). (323) 857-6010.