SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

 

Cendo, André, Leroux, Pesson: Ensemble Alternance, Regenstein Recital Hall at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. 11.10.2010 (CD)

Ensemble Alternance

 

Frédéric Baldassare, cellist

Dmitri Vassilakis, pianist

Jacques Ghestem, violinist

Jean-Luc Menet, flautist

Claire Merlet, violist

 

The concert Monday night by Ensemble Alternance at Northwestern University featured an all-French program of new music by up-and-coming composers performed by an ensemble known for their aptitude at tackling the most uncompromising pieces. Indeed, their repertoire reads like a list of the heroes of the musical vanguard in the latter part of the last century and the beginning of this one. The two most experienced players of the group, Messieurs Vassilakis and Ghestem, are former members of Pierre Boulez's Ensemble InterContemporain, and the younger members have appeared in recent years on recordings of music by contemporary French composers, primarily those collectively referred to, accurately or not, as a part of the Spectralism "school".

 

The program be gan with a short introduction by composer and Northwestern professor Hans Thomalla, and commenced with the world premiere of Affront, written for violin, cello, flute and piano by Raphaël Cendo, a student of Brian Ferneyhough and IRCAM in Paris. The piece begins suddenly and violently: the musical lines move in numerous directions seemingly disconnected with each other, the string players bow furiously with glissandi sliding up and down the bridges of their instruments, and the flautist trills and flutters over several registers. The pianist here performs several roles, reaching into the body of the instrument to scrape and pluck directly on the strings, and placing a large piece of metal foil over the lower register, which, when the keys are played, creates a percussive, rattling sound. The piece never relents until it ends just as abruptly as it began.

 

The second piece was iv 2 for solo cello by Mark André, who has studied with Helmut Lachenmann and Gérard Grisey, and recordings of André’s music have been appearing over the past decade. The work opens with barely audible scraping of the strings — so softly, in fact, that it was nearly drowned out by the sound of a woman laughing in the nearby lobby, who had to be silenced by Mr. Thomalla. The near-silence is broken by soft pizzicato plucks muted by bouncing the bow across the strings, moaning glissandi, double-stopped harmonics and col legno bowing below the bridge and, at one point, vertically parallel with the strings, which created a hissing sound. For the entire duration of the piece there are nearly no actual "notes" other than the few plucks and fretboard runs; instead there are whispers, breaths and grinding sounds, as if thick plastic were being ripped apart.

 

Philippe Leroux is a student of Messiaen and a professor of electronic composition at IRCAM. Contrary to its title, his piece ppp for flute and piano begins loudly with percussive jabs spat from the flute and the pianist setting up a dirge-like rhythm with a repeated single note, which then expands into large, octave-spanning chords redolent of the music of his teacher. The crunching march of chords then gives way to tangled melodic lines from the piano and high flute trills. There is then a sort of canonic mirroring between the two instruments and buzzing harmonics created by the flautist vocalizing and blowing simultaneously. The funereal rhythm returns with more force and the piece ends with crashing repeated tone-clusters from the lowest register of the piano.

 

Mr. Cendo’s Furia for cello and piano followed, and once again the confrontational title is appropriate: the players launch into it attacca with the pianist playing inside the instrument, scraping a horizontal piece of metal vertically along the strings, and the cellist furiously tapping and snapping the strings of his own instrument. Twice as long as the earlier piece, this one rarely relents in volume (save for brief moments of piano lyricism) until the cellist ends by detuning his lowest string down to a dull rattling.

 

The concert ended with Gérard Pesson's Mes Béatitudes for violin, viola, cello and piano, which Alternance has recorded on a Stradivarius disc, and which was most certainly the highlight of the night. The work begins with high whistling harmonics and singing vibrato in the strings, which moves into a clockwork rhythm with the musical lines passed from player to player, and underpinned by an obsessively repeated octave-spanning chord from the pianist. Later in the piece there is a bizarre quotation from the slow movement of Anton Bruckner's 7th symphony, played haltingly, whispering — as if the composer were recomposing the melody from a distant memory — and is soon swept away, the music falling into a strange waltz began by the pianist depressing the pedals of the instrument, creating a deep thud—like heavy footsteps. The work ended on a long diminuendo, retreating into silence. The small but dedicated audience resounded in hearty applause and the players bowed, smiling.

 

Overall, it was an interesting program, and if some of the pieces were somewhat sphinxlike, it was at the very least exciting to see these players willing (and very much able) to perform such difficult and little-heard music.

 

Corey Dominy