Florent Boffard Frederique Cambreling Michel Cerutti - Pierre Boulez Rpons Dialogue de lOmbre Double 2021 series (23 tracks) +Album Reviews

One of the landmark compositions of the 20th century

Satoshi Akima | Sydney, Australia | 12/24/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I have literally waited years to hear Repons and am not disappointed. For years it had been talked about as landmark work from this, the arguably most profound of post-war composers. Boulez, as always succeeds in creating his own hynotic, jewelled, glittering, and almost mystical sound world. It is a sound world which has over the years matured to become even more subtle, more evocative, more obsessively fascinating. Through huge stretches of the work time seems to held in suspended animation only to be allowed to erupt forth from its former captivity with frenetic energy only moments later. Boulez's many enemies have always claimed that his music lacks the power to move the listener. But whoever really listens - yes, really listens to this work can only but be deeply moved, not by its wearing heart on sleeve, but by the sheer sense of boundless awe and wonder which the work so effortlessly evokes. As arpeggio is layered upon arpeggio, and amplified seemingly into infinity the sense of awe is like that of the starry night sky, for like it the impact is not one of a simple and singular emotive response but one that is somehow abstract - and thereby utterly impossible to convey with words. Indeed this is truly one of the artistic landmarks of the 20th century"

A masterpiece and 20th century musical landmark.

Nicholas Fox | 12/21/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Pierre Boulez is, with Stravinsky, Bartok, Schoenberg and Webern, one of the 5 greatest composers of the 20th century, and Repons is a towering masterpiece. You simply must hear it. His command of energy, color and structure is as moving and powerful as anything the past masters of previous centuries achieved, and in this work he opens up new fields of expression and technique that are simply astonishing. If you listen closely, you may be moved. Don't be put off. This is titanic art from a titanic mind. Needless to say, the performance is definitive."

IRCAM's triumph finally recorded

Christopher Culver | 07/14/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"For several years after Pierre Boulez launched the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris in 1977, critics wondered why he himself had nothing to show in the field of electronic music. But when he finally unveiled "Repons" in 1981, he showed himself a comfortable with the new technology, and many called the work his masterpiece. On this Deutsche Grammophon disc, part of the "20/21" series of new music recordings, we finally get a recording of "Repons", performed by the composer's own Ensemble Intercontemporain with Boulez himself conducting, along with "Dialogue de l'ombre double" for clarinet and electronics.

"Repons", here in its completed 1984 version, is a piece of massive proportions. It is scored not only for orchestra, but also for six soloists (two pianos, harp, vibraphone, xylophone & glockspiel, and cimbalom), and at the time of its unveiling the electronic manipulation of its sounds depended on the behemoth 4X computer. The work also requires a special distribution of the instruments in the concert hall, with six speakers surrounding the audience.

It might sound complicated and eggheaded, but the musical structure Boulez builds out of these parts is ingenious and instantly likeable. The first of its ten sections is a simple chugging along by the orchestra, which sounds just like any ensemble effort. But then, this traditional music is torn asunder by the entrance of the soloists playing six simultaneous chords, amplified and bounced around the hall from speaker to speaker. Each of the soloists then plays individually an arpeggio, whose individual notes are captured by the electronics and themselves broken down into an arpeggio. Then, after a brief orchestral interlude, the soloists play arpeggios again, and this time the electronics generate an arpeggio of an arpeggio of arpeggio. What does this sound like? Just think lots of glittery, metallic sounds that are brilliantly chromatic. And that's just the beginning. Over the course of the work, Boulez displays such electronic wizardry as imposing one instrument's timbre over other sounds (Klangfarbemelodien), sustaining sounds into a shimmery continuum, and repeating certain sounds, with each appearance possessing a different alteration in pitch and rhythm. Finally, the piece has a clear dramatic arc, rare for Boulez, where we warm up slowly, hit a massive climax in the seventh section, and the gently cool down.

"Dialogue de l'ombre double" for clarinet and electronics was written in 1985 for the sixtieth birthday of Luciano Berio. The "dialogue" of the title is between a live clarinet and a pre-recorded and electronically treated clarinet. The work again makes use of the performance space, with the live clarinettist lit while performing and the pre-recorded portions played in darkness and projected from speaker to speaker. The music is lyrical and musing, and the soft interplay of the two elements is quite soothing after the bustle of "Repons". Boulez's writing for clarinet has clearly matured after his earlier solo piece "Domaines", and here Alain Damiens expertly handles Boulez's virtuoso material.

It's a pity that the rich spatial dimensions of the two works are collapsed here into a stereo recording--would that DG reissue this disc in surround sound. Nonetheless, a team at IRCAM developed special software for bringing the stereo sound as close as possible to the live experience, and this recording does indeed make for pleasurable listening. The liner notes are also relevatory, consisting of a description of the two pieces, an interview with Boulez, and IRCAM technician Andrew Gerzo's explanation of how the sound was adapted for stereo. Still, liner notes can only do so much, and if you really want to know more about the technology and theory behind "Repons", I'd recommend Dominique Jameux's PIERRE BOULEZ (Paris: Fayard/Sacem, 1984, with English translation Harvard University Press, 1991).

All of Boulez's late works are exciting, so if you're unsure about this disc, check out "Sur Incises" or "...explosante-fixe..." (also on DG). But any Boulez fan should eventually encounter these brilliant electroacoustical works."

Fabulous textures,long blankets,sound screens taking off

Christopher Culver | 04/28/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Boulez hesitated to record this masterpiece. And it's odd, very odd that we here the other side of the Atlantic had to wait this long to hear it. Of course you could have been like writer Jean Genet, who returned from a writing assignment in the Middle East to hear "Repons" in Paris. Boulez gives us long,richly textured timbral fields of sounds. You always sense control, that things, the various string tremoli for instance or the fast and frantic,clipped woodwinds never go off uncontrollably. The concept here of arpeggiated sound works well it gives a propulsive impetus,like electric charges,or short lightining bolts recharging the proceedings. Boulez was always fond of the harp and piano broken chords,(arpeggios) and ringing sonorities. This is here repeated as in his vocal works, only with a deep global-like maturity. Moments recede into the deeply textured sustained chords. You have never heard Boulez like this in "Repons" It is music one needs I think to be nourished in some creative emotive way. Long static screens. So powerful was this work that Boulez's people in Paris couldn't help an indirect copy like Peter Eotvos's "Chinese Opera" composers, Murail and Dufourt all owe something here to "Repons" and its conception. The "Dialogue de l'ombre double" when put along "Repons" comes off like a modest etude. Still it is the best piece yet featuring the solo clarinet with its "shadow"."

Notes across time and space.

Lord Chimp | Monkey World | 03/27/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"As with many post-serialist Boulez works, _Repons_ is a self-contained universe of musical rules. Serialism, while in some ways structurally liberating, does have essentially concrete, mathematical forms that one can fundamentally grasp, if only vaguely. _Repons_ is quite a different sort of work: it is alien, oblique, and pervasively structured with only the most counter-intuitive relations of harmony. I guess, depending on one's perspective, it could be completely dissonant or completely consonant.

Pierre Boulez likens _Repons_ to a spiral. But what supports the spiral? I liken it more to a big serpent with its tail in its mouth, where each musical idea is mutually reinforces each other idea. So fluid and aurally tight is the sound that it seems that if you could take any individual pitch at any given moment and trace it through all of its spatio-compositional relations you could see the entire piece. It would all be there. This is unrealistic, of course, but the whole is so vital in this work that to understand each individual moment in the music you will have no choice but to know how each is related to each. This is not uncommon in understanding art, or in understanding the nature of things. Hegel offered an argument that in order for a thing to be at all, it must be this rather than that, and the properties encompassed in "rather than that" were as essential to its being as the "this." "Something is in this relation to Other from its own nature and because otherness is posited in it as its own movement: its Being-in-Self comprehends negation, through which alone it now has its affirmative existence . . . it is just as this cancellation of its Other that it is Something." A rather obtuse way of making a very simple argument, but it applies so importantly here because _Repons_, as a musical experience, lacks much in the way of `emotional' connection (as in the feelings people typically associate with the term "emotional") and appeals to a rather different impulse. The emotion it satisfies, if there is any, is like the satisfaction when a mathematician completes an elaborate proof. It _is_ different, but it does satisfy in its own way.

All of this is, on consideration, a rather unhelpful way to discuss music. Most people would never want to listen to anything like this. But the reason that it might be helpful in this case is that some adventurous types might still want to check it out, and most musical experience does not deal with anything so abstract. Traditional Western harmony coheres to its relations in the major and minor scales; serialism coheres to its relations in mathematical forms. The rationale of _Repons_ is not so familiar. It operates at what must appear to the listener as a bewildering system. But with a goal towards seeing the whole, _repons_ becomes more intelligible and then VERY rewarding.

Let me try to give you an idea what the music is actually like. As a technical feat, the piece is daunting: it is scored for six percussive soloists (two piano, harp, vibraphone, xylophone/glockenspiel, and cimbalom) modified by live electronics and a live 24-piece orchestra. The electronic processors serve to reposition sounds - in live performance, spatial relations for performers and listeners alike. The audience surrounds the orchestra, and is surrounded in turn by six soloists with loudspeakers arranged to transform sounds.

Boulez says that he was interested in the ways past and present interact. The acoustic instruments produce raw material which is transformed and relocated so as to interact spatially and harmonically with its own reproductions and the sounds of the orchestra and soloists. This illustrates what I mean by the serpent analogy: the conclusion of the piece reveals that everything was included in it all along. The essence of each musical idea is drawn across myriad links, its essence changing as its relationship to other ideas is understood and seen as different but always identified with the original. Like a labyrinth of mirrors, its sonic images are reflected and distorted in so many ways it could induce vertigo. Its pervasive dissonance can be interpreted as an almost coherent harmony once every last piece is in place and the system is laid out completely. (I add the "almost" as a qualifier since this is one of Boulez's "works in progress" - this is the third and longest version of the composition and so perhaps the most complete.)

The complexity of its internal system makes _Repons_ is one of the most difficult pieces of music I have ever listened to. The musical argument is truly arduous to follow, and it places great responsibility on the listener to pay attention. It is not something I can listen to often and enjoy. This review is crap, seriously, and I don't recommend this album to ANYONE! But you should listen to it if you think you might find it rewarding.

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Search - Florent Boffard, Frederique Cambreling, Michel Cerutti :: Pierre Boulez: Répons / Dialogue de l'Ombre Double (20/21 series)

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