The French composer François Rossé has become a prominent figure over the years, particularly
in the area of expanded techniques for woodwind instruments. This
Quantum disc finds the fearless Radek Knop playing a program of
Rossé’s works for various saxophones, as well as for piano. The
world of modern academic music is certainly prone to pretension,
but Rossé’s music works on its own terms, even if the descriptions
of it in the program notes for this disc (in French only) often
sound overblown.
Ost-Atem (“East-Breath”) starts the disc off with a modernist swirl of extended
saxophone techniques, concrete sounds and electronic graffiti.
It would have more of a cool, weird, late-night cachet to it
if the composer didn’t insist in the program notes that the
musical language is concentrated and coherent, but then wander
off into some posturing about “the increasingly oppressive question
of identity” and then something about vacuums. Sometimes composers’
comments help, and then sometimes they don’t. Ignoring Rossé’s
conceptual distractions, however, this is quite interesting
and adventurous music, which justifies the attention Rossé has
garnered from performing musicians.
The
second track, Nihsi, is a piano solo work which starts
calmly, only to be torn apart by destructive gestures, such
as a recurrent repeated-note figure, which seek to destabilize
the serene harmonic base. A middle-section of restless energy
is built around manically repeated notes, though even there,
the foundation can’t be shattered. Finally, the opposites join,
the foundation losing its heaviness, and the disruptive elements
begin playing around the harmonized notes like sparks above
a fire. A lot of gestural music of the last 50 years can be
dismissed as experiments where the chemistry never ignited,
but there’s always room on my shelves for music like Nihsi,
which captures a miniature but nonetheless quite profound chemical
reaction. Impressive, too, that the unity of Rossé’s style and
Knop’s realization of it makes the transfer from saxophone to
piano satisfying. My French is limited, so I can’t make out
all of Rossé’s program note, but I gather that the title is
a play on “nih” from nihilism, and “si” the French term for
the note B natural (and also the French word for “if”), which
is the agent provocateur in the piece.
Knop
goes to the soprano saxophone for Scriu Numele Tǎu
and Arianna. The first riffs on Eastern-European style
grace-notes and roulades, combining them quite naturally with
modernist gestures and pushing them to dramatic heights. The
second, a very short piece, is nonetheless full of incident,
including short, crisp notes made with the help of clicking
keys.
Piano-Center, is a short, athletic workout which includes vocalisms from the pianist
as well as violent volleys of notes, before settling down to
a quieter close. Rossé’s note for the more recent and much more
individual Handgelöbnis (“Hand Vow”) talks about the
pianist’s hand sculpting the horizon, which is great way to
describe this dramatic narrative, which can go from punchy to
ethereal and back in just seconds. It earns its quiet moments
after short but intense battles, with an uneasy peace reigning
at the end. Rossé displays good sense on how far to push the
abrasive material. A little of that kind of gesturing can make
a piece of music vital. Too much, however, can make it annoying
and unrewarding. Rossé knows where that line is, making this
more accessible music than most of what has come out of universities
and colleges around the world in the last 25 years.
The
only alto saxophone solo on the album, Le Frêne Égaré (“The
Lost Ash”) is nonetheless the longest work here, at over 13
minutes, and is Rossé’s greatest hit, the one where he established
a new, experimental envelope for the classical saxophone, and
made a name for himself internationally. Dating from 1979, it
is the oldest piece here, and reflects its time, when atonal
and gestural music held full sway in academic circles. Indeed,
the piece is both a tour de force and a catalogue of experimental
techniques, including blowing, overblowing, harmonics, clicking
of keys, and more. Summarizing the experiments of the 1960s
and 70s and adding Rossé’s own innovations, the piece stands
as the keystone in the arch between the mid-twentieth century
avant-garde and Rossé’s freer, less dogmatic recent works. Particularly
Ost-Atem sounds like the achievement of a vision the
composer was trying to capture by using every trick in the book
in Le Frêne Égaré.
Rossé
appears to have been concentrating more on piano in recent years,
including a series of piano sonatas. This disc closes with the
Sixth Sonata, dating from 1996, and subtitled “Wesengesang”
(“Nature Singing”). It starts quietly but powerfully with a
steadily rising chromatic scale pattern over tolled notes in
the bass. Soon more scale fragments join the first, and mid-range
rhythmic patterns and grace notes proliferate. As the mass of
notes rises higher, it takes on a transcendental feel, ecstatically
rising and growing in volume, still over a bass pedal point.
Near the middle of the piece, the scales have become encrusted
with so many extra notes, they disappear in a glittering constellation
of high tones. Two-thirds of the way through, the bass stops
tolling as the swarm of notes climbs into the extreme high register
of the piano. The tones coalesce into radiant clusters, which
cause harmonics to ring out sympathetically below them as the
piano’s pedal is held down. After a series of such exultant
rings, the pedal is let up and one crisp cluster closes the
sonata. The sonata’s ten minutes seem to pass in a breath, and
its evolving structure makes it a worthy modern successor to
Scriabin’s Vers la flamme.
Avant-garde
saxophone enthusiasts will want this disc for those pieces, but
I recommend it to more general listeners with a tolerance for
modernism, because Rossé has a way of vaulting over the clichés
and onto an expressive plane in the Sixth Sonata, Nihsi
and Ost-Atem. Knop’s performances are assured and everything
is recorded in clear, attractive, close-up sound.
Mark Sebastian Jordan
