CLASSICAL CD
Listening to almost anything written by the modern French composer Henri Dutilleux it is hard to understand why his work was a specialists' preserve for so long.
HENRI DUTILLEUX: Correspondences; cello concerto Tout Un Monde Lointain... ; The Shadows Of Time . Barbara Hannigan (soprano, in Correspondences ), Anssi Karttunen (cello, in the concerto), Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France conducted by Esa- Pekka Salonen. DG CD or download.
During the 1970s, Rostropovich made a remarkable recording of the cello concerto included on this disc, and a "rosette" rating awarded by the Penguin Guide, then a bible for many classical record collectors, drew listeners outside of France to Serge Baudo's recording of Dutilleux's First Symphony some years later. But, in general, Dutilleux was marginalised by the fashionability among academics and intimidated critics of the more extreme styles of the then-avant-garde.
It was only in the 1990s, when Dutilleux's Ainsi La Nuit, an ethereal piece for string quartet that sounds like no other, began to appear regularly on concert programmes and the Chandos and Erato labels began issuing series of his orchestral works, that he began to receive the more widespread attention he deserved. Now Ainsi La Nuit has become the third work of choice for many string quartets to include on their Debussy/Ravel CDs and new accounts of his large-scale works appear frequently.
This new release is especially good. Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen has an instinctive understanding of Dutilleux's music, so much so that the 96-year-old composer himself asked him to record Correspondences, a work premiered in 2003 that appears here for the first time on disc. Dutilleux sat in on the sessions, offering what Salonen gratefully called "precise, practical and professional comments".
Listening to Correspondences it is easy to see why the conductor appreciated Dutilleux's suggestions, as it is a very personal work of great subtlety. In it, Dutilleux sets verses by Rilke and the French-based Indian poet Prithwindra Mukherjee together with two letters, one from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Rostropovich and his wife Galina Vishnevskaya, penned after the dark days of the writer's Soviet ordeal, and the other from Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo.
In his liner notes to this disc, Anthony Burton explains that the title, Correspondences, refers both to the fact that two of the texts set were originally letters and to the composer's "intention to find orchestral sonorities matching his texts". Dutilleux shares the title with Baudelaire, who used it for a poem that describes synesthesia, the correspondence of the impression received by one sense to those of another (a trumpet "sounds red", for example).
The way the impression received by one sense finds an equivalent in another is probably extremely personal, but for me the sound worlds that Dutilleux finds for the texts he sets support and extend them with great eloquence. In some cases he uses simple imitation, like the dense, fading cluster of orchestral sound that opens the setting in a French translation of the Rilke poem Gong, the first of the piece's six movements. But as the abstract sound pulls aside to create space for soprano Barbara Hannigan's mysterious vocal line, "No longer for ears sound/ which, like a deeper ear, hears us, who only seem/ to be hearing, Reversal of spaces", which picks up on the last surviving pitch of the decaying gong cluster, the orchestral gong resounds again and again, but each time it focuses more closely on distinct pitches, creating a poetic effect that is clumsy to describe, but that invites the focused listening needed to respond to the sonic landscapes that Dutilleux creates for each of the movements that follow.
Rhythm initially comes into the foreground in the setting that follows the Mukherjee poem Danse Cosmique, which takes Shiva's dance of destruction as a mystical metaphor for surging but ineffable emotions ("Flames that invade the Earth,/ flames like a deluge rush inside hearts,/ teasing the waves of a nocturnal ocean/ thunders peal in a lightning rhythm"). But as the music, with its leaping vocal line, progresses, it unleashes oddly coloured orchestral sonorities, some of an intense brightness that responds to the poem's pervasive flame imagery.
The brief interlude that follows is a shifting kaleidoscope of instrumental colour in which for the first time, and startlingly, an accordion is heard. The movement is followed without pause by the Solzhenitsyn setting. It is here, and in the final van Gogh setting, that Dutilleux's use of orchestral colour is so subtle and refined that a comparison with the final, Der Abschied movement of Mahler's Das Lied Von Der Erde is inevitable. The composer confirms the link himself at the movement's conclusion, where the word "toujours" is repeated over and over again, increasingly softly, like Mahler's "ewig ewig" at the end of Der Abschied.
This setting, like the one of van Gogh's letter, glows and shimmers with colour.
Often Dutilleux's sense of the correspondence of sound and text was clear to me: the solo violin accompaniment to Solzhenitsyn's moving expression of gratitude ("you tended my solitude with tact, you didn't even tell me of the growing constraints and harassment you were subject to"), the sudden flash of celesta light at the word "Seigneur" (Lord) in the writer's concluding, "One can only derive strength from the knowledge that in our time we Russians are fated to a common doom, and one can only hope that the Lord will not punish us to the end." Elsewhere, the bond between work and sound is less direct, but the setting as a whole is powerfully moving throughout. In the van Gogh letter, with its direct references to colour ("As long as autumn lasts, I shall not have hands, canvas and colours enough to paint the beautiful things I see"), Dutilleux's correspondences are often more explicit than in the Solzhenitsyn movement, but as the painter digs more deeply and ambiguously into his use of colour and the emotional associations it has for him, the composer's response to the text become more poetic and personal, especially in a concluding discussion by van Gogh of his Night Cafe.
Soprano Hannigan is magnificent here, soaring through the shifting spectrum of the orchestral texture at the top of her range and concluding brilliantly on a high D, attacked dead-on right at the centre of the note. This new account of the cello concerto is less rhetorical as an interpretation and better balanced as a recording than the classic Rostropovich/Baudo version, although that performance remains irreplaceable.
Listeners who know The Shadow Of Time from the Ozawa or Tortelier recording will find an equally fine version here, especially distinguished by the contributions of three boy sopranos from the Maitrise de Radio France. But discussion of the various recordings that work deserves a column to itself.
I purchased my CD of this programme online from amazon.com. It is available from iTunes and other online vendors.
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