SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Combier, Hurel, Chauris, Amy: Jean-Frédéric Neuburger (piano), BBC National Orchestra of Wales, François-Xavier Roth (conductor), BBC Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff, 27.10.2010 (GPu)

Combier, Gris cendre

Philippe Hurel, Flash-Back

Chauris, …solitude, récif, étoile

Amy, L’espace du souffle

The Hoddinott Hall, within the Millennium Centre on Cardiff Bay is the perfect venue for the specialised concert programme unlikely to fill (or half-fill!) a more conventionally sized auditorium such as St. David’s Hall in the centre of Cardiff. It has room for a full-sized (or even an extra-large orchestra), good acoustics and top-class recording facilities. In the present season it has hosted (or will host) concerts including work by Arvo Pärt, Arlene Sierra, the Swiss composer Michael Jarrell, Christopher Painter and Marc-André Dalbavie amongst living composers (and, naturally and properly, works by a number of Welsh composers), as well as more canonical programmes including compositions by Mozart and Beethoven, Prokofiev and Ravel, Elgar, Britten, Mussorgsky, Stravinsky and many others. It is a real feast of music – and offered at remarkably low prices – for those able to get to its concerts regularly.

On this particular occasion, Frenchman François-Xavier Roth, Associate Guest Conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, directed a programme of music by four of his compatriots. The four composers offered some interesting stylistic comparisons and contrasts, as one might expect if only because of the considerable age differences amongst them, Gilbert Amy having been born in 1936, Philippe Hurel in 1955, Jérôme Combier in 1971 and Yves Chauris in 1980.

One interesting common feature, irrespective of stylistic differences, was that all four of the compositions were, as one might say, intermedial in their references and, to a degree, in their inspirations.

With the first work performed, Combier’s Gris cendre (composed in 2006) the work’s origin (acknowledged in the score) lay in the composer’s response to one of Samuel Beckett’s short prose works, published in French (as Sans) in 1969, and in English (as Lessness) in 1970 (self-translated from the French). It is a spare, elaborately permutational work, where phrases and individual words are laid side by side, without ever forming actual sentences. Combier’s title (‘Grey ash’) is one of the phrases to which Beckett’s text returns time and again (as, for example, in “Scattered ruins same grey as the sand ash grey true refuge” near the beginning of the work). Naturally enough, Combier’s music is largely made up of abutting short phrases, more striking for their patterns of repetition and permutation than for their forward movement or logical development; the sense of collage, but of collage with some underlying mathematical principles, was strongly evident. The percussion section was prominent, the piano was played both inside and outside, there were some unorthodox woodwind sounds and some striking, and often decidedly beautiful, orchestral textures. The whole, on a single listening, was both intriguing and largely satisfying.

For Philippe Hurel the point of intermedial reference was with cinema, and with other narrative forms such as the novel. What Hurel was endeavouring was the incorporation into a musical structure of the device, common enough in such cinematic or fictional forms, of the flashback. I can’t honestly say that I would have recognised that that was the structural ‘narrative’ principle underlying the work, save for the composer’s own explanation as paraphrased in Peter Reynolds’ programme notes. Nor, even forearmed with such knowledge did the idea of the ‘flashback’ seem the best or most helpful way of thinking about or experiencing the music. A first section presented materials which became, in his terms, the subject of flashbacks in the three ensuing sections; it was hard to hear how this differed from normal musical practice. Apparently Flash-Back also incorporates quotations –as ‘flash-backs’ – from the composer’s earlier works. For all my sense that allusion to the concept/technique of the flashback didn’t do much to illuminate the music, I did enjoy its harmonic adventurousness and the precise complexity of some of its rhythms; the writing for the brass section and for tuned percussion was especially interesting and Hurel’s use of longer phrases, longer musical paragraphs, made an interesting contrast with the piece that had preceded it. The sheer business of the music was sometimes exhilarating but at other times brought it too close to incomprehensibility. The work’s closing bars had an ethereality which was rather unexpected after most of what had gone before.

… solitude, récif, étoile… by Yves Chauris, written in 2002 and premiered in Paris in 2003, also has an intermedial dimension. The nouns of its title (‘loneliness, reef, star’) are quoted from the twelfth line of Mallarmé’s sonnet ‘Salut’. Mallarmé’s poem uses the imagery of ‘un ivresse belle’ (‘a fine drunkenness’) and of a voyage on stormy seas, with the loneliness, reef and star exemplars of whatever might be worth “le blanc souci de notre toile” (“our sail’s white concern”). In Chauris’ piece one sensed something of this sense of a voyage of aspiration towards a fulfilment probably unattainable, but which was enough to give value and meaning to the journey, a journey shared, in the poem, with friends. … solitude, récif, étoile… is, in all but name, a piano concerto, the soloist here being the prodigiously gifted young pianist and composer Jean-Frédéric Neuburger (who was also the soloist at the work’s premiere). Chauris’ orchestra is made up of only a percussion section (three strong) and a woodwind and brass section (of fifteen players). Briefly interviewed before the performance, Chauris explained that he had conceived this orchestra as a kind of ‘amplified piano’s pedal’. The orchestra is, as it were, an aural extension of the keyboard, rather than being – for the most part – in antithetical dialogue with it. In a single movement, and lasting some fifteen minutes, this impressive work (even more impressive when one remembers that it was written by a twenty-two year old composer) integrates soloist and orchestra in a pleasing and individual fashion, finding room both for a cadenza-like passage for the soloist of considerable beauty and delicacy, as well as for some lovely dialogue between clarinet and piano at the work’s close, alongside some rhythmically hard-driven passages with a strong sense of forward movement (albeit a momentum easily tempted, as it were, into side ways and pauses). Chauris is recognised in France as one of the most interesting composers of his generation and has already (at thirty) been much garlanded with prizes and fellowships. It wasn’t hard to see/hear why.

Gilbert Amy belongs to an older, more established generation altogether. His L’espace du soufflé, written in 2007 and premiered in 2008, might – with no pejorative intentions – be described as a symphonie manqué. Its three movements (Très modéré – Très vif – modéré) incorporate clearly delineated sections with resemblances to the familiar pattern of introduction, scherzo, slow movement and finale. Here too, as with the other works on the programme, there is relationship to the other arts. The work’s title (‘The space of breath’) effectively defines it as a work written in homage to the memory of the painter Frédéric Benrath, a friend of Amy’s since 1960, who died in 2007. One of his most important series of paintings was called L’espace du soufflé. Benrath’s work was associated with as style of painting given the name of Nuagisme, the reference to clouds pointing to such painting’s attempt to paint the boundless and the fluid of form. Something of that fluidity, of sustained chords growing, fusing and dissipating, characterised the first movement, in which the low strings were attractively deployed. In the central movement – a number of the work’s transitional passages were given to the percussion section – the upper strings were prominent in the statement of the material, vivaciously rhythmic and intense; in the final movement some expansive phrases, forming slowly building (and disintegrating) melodies alternated with some quite stormy (storm ‘clouds’, as it were) and fiercely chiselled, serrated passages. Throughout there were inventive orchestral groupings and some intriguing orchestral textures. It rounded off a rewarding evening of music one all too rarely gets the chance to hear live. Those who couldn’t do so, might like to know that the concert is scheduled for broadcast on Radio 3’s Hear and Now on December 11^th, 2010.

Glyn Pursglove