This disc, which mixes
orchestral works with piano pieces,
is the fourth Naxos CD devoted to music
by this striking and increasingly fascinating
Lebanese-French composer. Naxos’s example
shows the kind of terrific commitment
that contemporary composers need. El-Khoury
has literally struck the right note
with both Naxos and with his growing
band of admirers.
The first work on the
disc should have received its first
performance in New York just as I write
(September 2006). It is in memory of
the victims of 9/11 and is given the
wonderful title of ‘Tears and Hope’
- tragedy and expectation side by side.
The composer contacted me as I was preparing
this review to say that due to security
difficulties its performance has been
postponed for twelve months. So you
can only hear it on CD at present.
The music was begun
a few years ago but started to coalesce
when the composer began to consider
the terrible events of 9/11. Here is
a work in respect of which you may feel
that any composer who would write such
a composition is either naïve or
stupid. But El-Khoury is neither of
these things. He has written a heartfelt
plea for peace and love across all nations.
It starts from a mood of dark despondency,
even resignation. Over a long pedal,
little scatterings of almost apologetic
sounds can be picked out seemingly at
random. The music then rises through
pain to an uplifting ending. For me
the joy at the end is too easily attained.
The huge major chord achieved a little
too easily but this does not take away
the aching beauty of this masterpiece.
Perhaps future conductors will just
hold back the tempo a little more in
the last dozen bars or so to make the
final chord even more telling.
The second work is
also orchestral. I had the privilege
of hearing it open the last Master Prize
concert in the Barbican about three
years ago. Its birth and original commission
is somewhat unusual. ‘The Rivers Engulfed’
(Les Fleuves engloutis) was broadcast
a movement at a time. This curious state
of affairs is explained in the excellent
booklet notes by Gérald Hugon:
"the composer had to write a work
of about ten minutes comprising five
sections each of which was to reflect,
in miniature form, a particular state
of the piece within the work as a whole
… The aim was to allow the progressive
entry of listeners into a work through
repeated hearings over a weekend in
the course of several broadcasts"
- would BBC Radio 3 consider such an
idea? - "The work was then repeated
complete at the end of the weekend."
That is why in making up a work of just
over thirteen minutes there are five
well-contrasted sections all with different
titles like ‘ Song of Silence’ and ‘Struggle’.
The mood is often sombre but broken
by dramatic and powerful passages evoking,
as I have noted in his music before,
a vast biblical landscape. ‘Tears and
Hope’ starts carefully over a deep pedal
and gradually sets out on its adventure
of sound before almost ending as it
began. The work was very adequately
recorded at the aforementioned Master
Prize final and it is that which is
presented here.
Bechara El-Khoury enjoys
bipartite forms. It seems to me that
these are different from Binary structures.
One tends to think of the latter as
two equals: A+B. In bipartite form one
section may be longer than the other,
or carry more weight emotionally even
if it is shorter. The ‘Sextet’, here
in a version for string orchestra, ’Fragments
Oubliés’ and ‘Waves’ fall into
this category. Other works to a similarly
plan include the 2nd Piano
Sonata op. 61 and the ‘Quintet à
vent’ Op. 46.
When writing for the
piano he is a far more harmonically
radical composer than in the orchestral
works which can often touch, if not
even stray into, tonality. These two
piano works are striking in their dissonance
and harmonic instability, especially
the faster sections. ‘Fragments Oubliés’
begins chromatically, almost like early
twelve-tone Schoenberg, feeling its
way towards its ideas. After five minutes
the fragments flit across the soundscape
and eventually coalesce into a rapid
and vapid array of notes using the entire
keyboard in a quixotic display of fireworks.
‘Waves’ is likewise harmonically unstable
and experimental. We are reminded of
the good and bad side of the effects
of water and floods. Again, good and
evil, joys and sufferings are represented.
These are two sides of a coin, the theme
we met in the first work, Tears and
Hope. These are bi-partite contrasts,
side by side. Michael Tippett heads
the score of ‘A Child of Our Time’ "the
darkness declares the glory of the light",
and later famously writes "I would
know my shadow and my light". This
is what Bechara El-Khoury is constantly
exploring and no doubt still will in
future works, and, I believe, even more
profoundly.
I know that the composer
was grateful for and proud, pleased,
and excited by the meticulous performances
his music received here. He was present
at the recordings and you can be sure
that what you hear is what he intended
and that the performers have likewise
found his music moving and exhilarating
all at once.
Gary Higginson
London Symphony Orchestra/Martyn Brabbins (opp.
58, 65); London Symphony Orchestra/Daniel Harding
(op. 64); Dimitri Vassilakis (piano) 
