NEW RELEASE OF THE YEAR - MARC-ANDRE DALBAVIE CONCERTOS...

[jayne lee wilson]

NEW RELEASE OF THE YEAR. 21stC. MARC-ANDRE DALBAVIE CONCERTOS…SEATTLE SO /MORLOT 24/96 QOBUZ-STUDIO.

The album is beautifully planned: two buzzing, bubbling quicksilver wind concerti (not without more reflective episodes…the flute concerto has an extended meditation, solo against glistening, hovering textures about halfway through) framed by longer, deeper, more contemplative creations.
Don’t pass over or through these concertos too lightly: their mischievous, playful brilliance of sound and movement, endlessly, exhilaratingly inventive, soon leads the ear and the heart into grimmer sonic fairytales…it all flashes by in a surrealistic dream.
I especially like the way the flute’s rippling figurations run into darker deeper, slower sonorities of brass and strings; the silver adventurer contemplates the intriguing new territory, then embarks across another new landscape.
These two concerti (from 2006/2009) may have Boulez or even Maderna as forebears; but they are very individual creations whatever their inner or outer sources.

The 2013 Cello Concerto, longest and most wide-ranging work here with 6 dovetailed, cross-referential, fantasia-style episodes, may have the Dutilleux Tout un Monde as a forebear, but after the truly startling beginning develops a marvellously unpredictable inevitability of its own, going far beyond textural beauty or display into much deeper, darker regions; a whole other world indeed.… there’s a strange, sort-of-stepwise solo for the cello, sparsely accompanied, which has a hallucinatory quality about it… akin to those dreams of flying slowly, or floating…. it has haunted me ever since I first heard it.

A fabulous piece I keep returning to…”in my end is my beginning”…. I’ve never heard anything quite like it. A knockout end to a killer album.

The 2008 centenary tribute placed first, La Source d’un Regard takes four notes of the Messiaen Vingts Regards and after each shape-shifted reappearance, drifts or floats through sensuous, gleaming meditations upon them, mainly slow, dark and contemplative. it is a homage in sound too, as it adumbrates a Messiaen-Style metallic sonority of winds/brass/percussion; finally more explosive, airy, then defiant, it has string shapes and sonorities which may remind you of such passages in e.g. Eclairs sur l’au-dela or a chastened Turangalila…
Sounding more tactile and immediate here than on an earlier HORIZON RCOA release, its transfixing beauty seems to create a safe space for one’s own meditation upon last things.

This isn’t, I’m glad to say, easy music to categorise. Dalbavie tends to be referred to as “Spectralist”…. doubtless he comes from such a background, but the music on this album seems to travel far beyond……toward many unknown regions of the soul, the mind, the inner landscapes…
It is a free-thinking voyage à l’inconnu no curious musiclover should miss…

***
What a shame Morlot is leaving Seattle - that Seattle SO Media/Morlot tag has come to have a real buzz, a tempting anticipatory cachet about it…One always looked excitedly for each release.
So many great recordings - not least the Dutilleux series…I guess it is too much to hope for a Dalbavie Vol 2 one day…

[Stanfordian]

Hiya Jayne,

Thanks for the alert. I will certainly make a point of checking out this album of Marc-Andre Dalbavie concertos.

I remember that in 2015 at Philharmonie, Berlin I was reporting from a concert that included countertenor Philippe Jaroussky singing a new work 'Sonnets sur un poème de Louise Labé' for countertenor and orchestra composed for him by Marc-Andre Dalbavie. A most lovely work and I seem to remember Dalbavie being called to the stage to take his bow.

[Pianoman]

i must investigate this...I've had a cd since 2005 of his orchestral work 'Color', coupled with the Violin Concerto and 'Ciaccona', a very interesting disc which I have enjoyed replaying.

[Richard Barrett]

For sure it's all beautifully played and recorded, and orchestrated with great skill, but aside from that I don't find myself getting involved in it at all, either emotionally or intellectually. All the soloists in their concertos seem to spend a lot of their time running through a very traditional expressive/technical gamut, apart from which it strikes me as very well-behaved and tasteful music, which I suppose some might regard as a compliment, but I want contemporary music to be more than this...

[ahinton]

For sure it's all beautifully played and recorded, and orchestrated with great skill, but aside from that I don't find myself getting involved in it at all, either emotionally or intellectually. All the soloists in their concertos seem to spend a lot of their time running through a very traditional expressive/technical gamut, apart from which it strikes me as very well-behaved and tasteful music, which I suppose some might regard as a compliment, but I want contemporary music to be more than this...

I'm not about to express an opinion on this music here at this point but do please tell us what it is that you don't care for about it beyond the fact that you don't find yourself getting involved in it emotionally or intellectually - not least WHY you don't feel involved in it in either way; I'm not seeking to argue with you here - I'm just asking, if I may presume to do that...