Even if he had written just one work – Quatre Chants pour Franchir le Seuil, not performed until after his shockingly sudden death in 1998 at the age of 52 – Gérard Grisey would deserve his place among the greatest composers of the second half of the 20th century. But as one of the architects of spectralism in the 1970s, Grisey’s achievement and influence extended far beyond that achingly beautiful final masterpiece. Beyond his native France though, only a handful of his works are at all familiar: besides the Quatre Chants there are the pieces that make up the six-part cycle Les Espaces Acoustiques, and the late Vortex Temporum, which takes a motif from Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé as its starting point. But the rest of his substantial output remains little explored.
This collection, featuring works from the beginning, middle and end of Grisey’s creative life, offers a good perspective. The earliest piece here, Mégalithes, for 15 brass instruments, was composed while he was a member of Olivier Messiaen’s composition class at the Paris Conservatoire in 1968-69. Made up of nine musical sequences which can be performed in any one of nine orders, its fierce rhetoric seems influenced by Xenakis more than any other composer, and, dedicated to the memory of the Biafran victims of the Nigerian civil war, it has a political dimension too, for the only time in Grisey’s career.
If Mégalithes is stylistically very different from his later works, then the large-scale orchestral Dérives from 1974 was the piece that Grisey identified as his first using spectral techniques – though spectralism was a term he later rejected altogether. The music grows directly out of the note A to which the orchestra tunes and from the microtonal variations around that pitch. The slowly shifting textures acquire an almost Ravelian lushness, punctuated by sudden, intense fortissimos, with a final radiant climax. It already has the sensual quality that grows more intense in Grisey’s later music, and which dominates the third piece here, L’Icône Paradoxal from 1994, a setting for soprano, mezzo and orchestra of texts by Piero della Francesca (from his treatise on perspective). The material for the voices gets steadily faster and more intensely entwined, while the orchestra writing beneath them gradually slows and becomes more harmonically orientated. As the performance under Sylvain Cambreling shows, as so often with Grisey, the result is music of intense beauty and just a little mystery too.
This week’s other pick
Also among the latest batch of releases from Bastille Musique is a collection of music for brass by Iannis Xenakis, played by Ensemble Schwerpunkt. It includes Eonta, the thrillingly abrasive brass-and-piano piece from 1964 that so impressed the student Grisey, as well as Linaia-Agon, a “musical game” for horn, trombone and tuba, and Khai-Perr for five brass and percussion. With Lorenzo Soulès as the breathtakingly agile pianist in Eonta, the performances are all outstanding, with just the right edge of fierceness that Xenakis’s music requires.
