This piano work, composed on the occasion of Pierre Boulez’s ninetieth birthday, refers in its title to American artist Barnett Newman, who numbers among the twentieth-century abstract expressionists.In his famous essay “The Sublime is Now,” Newman wrote in 1947: “The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.”

This music turns out to be an emphatic experience as soo...