Good penumbral Ferneyhough
scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 02/17/2007
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Ferneyhough's oeuvre has reached the performative platitude where you can sort and compare different recordings of identical works. The Parisians Ensemble Intercontemporain has long devoted their efforts to Ferneyhough's interesting webs of complexities, more like white ice sheets adhering to a window pane.You can here them the firtst recording on Erato of theses works.The two "Funerallies" are to be separated during live performances to sort the relative readings of similar materials. The intrusions of the Harp helps sharply define the string constitution. Most of this string music is well crafted with a rich diverse array of extended timbres occuring in fairly close proximity. You merely become absorbed into the sound of all of it. The scaled down chamber strings as well (As writing this work for a complete string orchestra), was a useful choice in the interesting results Ferneyhough achieves herein. One cannot help but think of Listz equally a purveyor of timbral virtuosic complexity, and Ferneyhough's interest also in the penumbral, the "shadows" of the lifeworld as becoming but more a "passing" of live life or energies,movements,arrays into states of stasis. The overwhelming complexity now seems more and more commonplace, yet one needs to look at what it all means within Fernyhough's sub-texts often he pursues the visuals arts a poet and a text to trigger instrumental discourse.Still the pure virtuosity allowed is a freedom we can still hold within the liberal adminstered world.
Irving Arditti is no stranger to this music, long a committed devotee of the cause of the complex web of inter-turnings of rapid fire timbral transformations, transmogrifications. Here he is allowed to render his skills a first chair,solo not as leader of the quartet. And he does give a "third person" reading always I think.(His Cage is abysmal in the other direction) There is no point in becoming too enraptured over complexity because it then leads to dangerous romanticized realizations. Here the sheer spontanaeity, the rhythmic freedom is wonderful to experience, where every particle of timbre is heard under Arditti's hands.The title "Invisible Colours" gives also a "third person" content to the proceedings, as if the linear arrays, and lynes mean something that is not self-evident simply from hearing the work, a concept must be engaged always for this music, it is far too difficult simply to listen when therte are more interesting sub-texts alive and workable that gives the music its inherent meanings. We often complain that we cannot posit a meaning with post-modernities vagaries of concept, where the concpet does come first before a note is written. The concept the subjectivized unfetter hero of complexities cause is here. Likewise the heroic "Bone Alphabet, but a but more practical work for a working percussionist. The player is allowed to select the six instruments utilized. Steven Shick (see his wonderful book "The Percussionist's Art")has well written about this work and the work necessary to play it,absorb it, (take into one's soul)and memorize it. The results here are threadbare beauty,a thud, a cluck, a tap, very beautiful in an unpretencious way.This is simply not the case for all percussion solos if you care to survey the literature. You need allow the timbres to be free, and the rhythmic freedom here also helps set free the timbres from the "tyrant" meter.Although meter is indeed never let go, there is a quite strict agenda at work with irrational gradations of quintuplets set against triplets and oct-tuplets.One can listen to this forever.The contrapuntal conundrums quickly mount snowballs gentle into imperceptible arrays for contemplation from the lifeworld.Swabs of wonderful timbres are here yet slowly given over in gradations. This is the most interesting solo percussion piece in some time."
Track Listings (4) - Disc #1