26.09.2008 Gérard Grisey (www.musicalcriticism.com)

The second piece on the disc, Les Chants de l'Amour, was completed in 1984. It was Grisey's first large-scale vocal composition, and here the dramatisation of musical material that occurs throughout his instrumental work is very overt, within the context of a 'music theatre'. With its chattering and countrapuntal vocals, for the most part unintelligible, this is a work that, if any, serves to belie the usual thought that spectral music simply corresponds to an over-technical extravagance of harmony. What is shown again here is that power of description that was a major concern of Grisey, and which explodes in a piece that does not rely on any stereotypically 'spectral'-orchestral tenets. References points are mentioned in the programme notes and spring to the ear readily – the polyphony of African pygmy music, the vocal music of Ockeghem and Dufay, Stockhausen's Stimmung. One perhaps unlikely likeness is with the late work of Feldman, and such pieces as Coptic Light, where there is also to be found an ongoing, processual repetition of cells, minor alterations denying any mechanical identity (this method was displayed by Grisey as early as Prologue). The technical proximity of these two composers is of course open to conjecture, or further exploration.

Schola Heidelberg here takes on the performance, conducted by Walter Nußbaum. Their repertoire ranges from ancient music to the commissioning of contemporary music from composers such as Helmut Lachenman, and they boast a masterery of the myriad vocal techniques required of these collective poles. That range is on generous display here and you get a sense of their relishing the opportunity to exercise it. The delirious swirl of the music admits the listener of many musical reminisces, traversing a span of different spheres of the mind of its anonymous incipient – a growling, electronically generated voice, a tape part generated at IRCAM, at play throughout with the human voices of the ensemble. This is a work 'dedicated to all the world's lovers', and its mellifluous flow creates an arch amatory chaos, ordered carefully as usual by Grisey. Towards the end the piece develops into a slow breathing in the electronic tape part leading into one of the more memorable parts of this piece, a soft, two-chord, slow oscillation, accompanied by a wavering alto voice fading in and out, which develops into a beautiful quarter-tone melodic line. Grisey refers to this brief section as a lullaby, and the piece thereafter ends in a reversion to the electronic voice, and what is presumably its dream – the world babbling with information, the last logical place the piece can go in returning us, the listeners, to ourselves.

By Liam Cagney
http://www.musicalcriticism.com/recordings/cd-grisey-0808.shtml
Freitag, 26. September 2008

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