Marilyn Nonken (piano)
Tuesday 11 March 2003
Miller Theater,
New York City
Presented under the auspices of the "Sounds
French"
festival
Murail:
Comme un
oeil suspendu et poli par le songe
Estuaire
Territoires
de l'oubli
La
Mandragore
Cloche d'adieu, et un sourire ... (in
memoriam Olivier Messiaen)
Les Travaux et les
Jours
Ensemble Sospeso
Miller Theater, New York City
Saturday 1 March
2003
Presented under the auspices of the "Sounds French"
festival
Grisey:
Jour,
contra-jour for
13 instruments,
electronic organ and four-channel
tape
Talea, ou la machine et les herbes
folles
for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and
piano
Vortex Temporum for piano
and five instruments
As a compositional technique, spectralism has a conceptual appeal. Every sound contains a different configuration of overtones — a spectrum — which accounts for the timbral contrast between, say, a violin, a clarinet and a bell; through analyzing a given sound (now comparatively easy with computer technology), one can discern that sound's spectrum; one can then use various spectra as the basis for the harmony of a composition, and, by extension, for the melodic content and rhythm as well. Because everything relates back to a particular spectrum, the resulting musical language unfolds with an almost unconsciously perceived unity.
Spectral music doesn't sound tonal in the traditional sense, but it does possess something akin to the note-to-note and chord-to-chord gravitational pull found in tonal harmony. The technique has taken root in many a compositional imagination, especially in France, so it's fitting that the "Sounds French" festival of contemporary music being presented in New York this month featured concerts devoted to two of the founding figures of the spectralist movement, Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail.
Ensemble Sospeso's program on 1 March drew an outline of Grisey's artistic trajectory, from its formative days to its final flowering. (Sadly for the music world, Grisey died in 1998 at age 52.) The early Jour, contra-jour (1978–79) explores the fundamentals of sound: the work is almost entirely dominated by pitches fading in and out, with the instrumental parts carefully dovetailed into the sonic fabric of a pre-synthesized tape track. While the piece now seems dated (the electronic heartbeat rhythms sound particularly corny today), one could discern behind the score a deeply curious mind just embarking on a new path, trying to get "inside" sound, playing with the threshold between the live ensemble and the ambient environment provided by the tape.
Talea, ou la machine et les herbes folles (1986) — a captivating piece and one of Grisey's better-known works — is founded on the same kind of essentialized sonic objects found in Jour, contra-jour. Yet here, the development of spectral technique is more satisfying: from a foundation of pure timbre, Grisey explicitly conjures all of the traditionally recognized elements of composition — line, harmony, melody and rhythm. From its first shivering string gesture, Talea jumps between frantically cascading figures and tensely suspended sonorities; the effect is of brightly colored bits and pieces of metal, paint and plaster, along with other found objects, hurled against a canvas and miraculously forming a fabulous sonic mural. Sospeso's playing was fantastic, with special praise due to violinist Mark Menzies, who achieved white-hot intensity by the end of the piece.
The concert concluded with the U.S. premiere of Vortex Temporum (1994–96), Grisey's final work and magnum opus. The opening passage, apparently derived from a piccolo solo from the third tableau of Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, is a florid tangle of counterpoint for flute, clarinet and piano. From here unfurls a six-movement work, each individual section dominated by singular, strikingly wrought gestures — out-of-sync rocking figures on muted strings, downward sliding glissandos, plucked-then-held sonorities — each one added to the mix of all that has preceded. There's even an entire virtuoso movement (tossed off with raw bravura by Stephen Gosling) for de-tuned piano that's like Nancarrow through smashed glass. With a return of the opening passage in the fifth movement, this time with strings added, Vortex Temporum takes on the shape of an arc, but one with such variety between each end that the piece seems to embody both a grand formal design and glittering, serendipitous, free-floating episodes. The formidable musicians of Ensemble Sospeso were completely involved with the music; there was never a second of glib proficiency.
Grisey's version of spectralism allowed a great deal of leeway in the use of line, figure, harmony, rhythm and tempo. Yet even when, for example, the harmony drops sharply from spiky dissonance to almost major-chord consonance, there's a rightness to the shift; it sounds nothing like the kind of heavy-handed reference to tonality sometimes found in the work of other atonal composers. With Grisey, one can hear the spectral "ring" between the notes, and it lends a seductive haze to even the prickliest, most mercurial passages.
Tristan Murail brings out this resonating quality with even greater focus, as pianist Marilyn Nonken's program of 11 March demonstrated. Even in the youthful Comme un oeil suspendu et poli par le songe ... (which here received its belated U.S. premiere), one can hear the sense of time suspended that seems to run throughout the composer's oeuvre. The works from the 1970s, Estuaire and Territoires de l'Oubli, have a kind of Boulezian profile, but with a more insistent concentration on color (and more use of pedal). With the compositions from the 1990s, Murail arrives at a well-defined style of keyboard writing: bursts of pitches in the high register with the activity slowly dying away; repeated notes, tremolos and Ravel-once-removed sonorities in the middle range; single bell-tones at the bottom of the keyboard; spindly scales winding their way up and down — all of this articulating and filling out the spectral background harmony, the "ring," that hovers behind the surface of the piece.
Nonken is fearless: this program had more notes that one cares to think about, and she blazed through all of them with ease and a bit of sang-froid. Visually, she exudes expert detachment, but she clearly understands the music deeply.
Les Travaux et les Jours, written for Nonken and receiving its
world premiere, contains an even more essentialized, almost purified version of
the keyboard writing described above. The first gesture, a high, limpid scale
trickling up to a repeated note, re-emerges in varied forms in each of the
score's episodes, which link together to form a gorgeously kaleidoscopic
tapestry of sound color. Les Travaux must run for something like 45
minutes, but just when the piece suggests a winding down, the music turns a
corner and one finds a new, glowing aural vista.
