Tempi and time work together on Salzburg’s extraordinary musical journey in Grisey’s Le Noir de l’Étoile – Seen and Heard Worldwide

Austria Salzburg Pageant [2] – Grisey, Le Noir de l’Étoile: Motus Percussion (Christoph Sietzen, Leonhard Schmidinger, Nico Gerstmayer, Akisato Takeo, Miguel Llorente Gil, Lorenzo Manquillet). Kollegienkirche, Salzburg, 24.7.2024. (MB)

Having emerged from Georg Friedrich Haas’s Koma on the Mozarteum (assessment right here), the prospect for a breath of recent air and a fast beer within the shadow of Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach’s Kollegienkirche was a cheerful one, previous to coming into the church for additional musical liminality, within the type of Gérard Grisey’s Le Noir de l’Étoile from Motus Percussion, led by Christoph Sietzen. Though the 2 performances weren’t formally related, save as a part of the Pageant’s Ouverture Spirituelle, it’s tough to consider there was not some intent within the scheduling; at any price, it made for an illuminating journey to journey from absolutely the darkness of Haas’s coma opera to the starry sky of Grisey’s work for six percussionists, tape, and electronics.

The skies have after all fascinating and impressed composers and different artists from the daybreak of time, however there’s something very a lot of its time to Grisey’s concept and realisation, resting because it does on the 1967 discovery of alerts emitted by pulsars, a category of neutron star, residue of supernova explosions, whose spin is with common rapidity picked up with each rotation. (For this, I’m indebted to useful programme notes by Jean-Pierre Liminet, whose introductory textual content is usually learn out previous to efficiency, and Tim Rutherford-Johnson.) The science is fascinating, insofar as I perceive it, and performed an important, certainly figuring out function within the conception, born of Grisey’s friendship while instructing at Berkeley with the astrophysicist Joseph Silk. However in the end, it’s the musical work and its efficiency that we expertise, albeit with the intervention of a pulsar recording that appears each to verify and to appropriate the dizzying array of untuned percussion we’ve beforehand heard.

Tempi and time interacted on a unprecedented musical journey – Stockhausen, who inevitably involves thoughts, eat our coronary heart out – they fashioned and have been framed by, from now to the Vela pulsar (12,000 years previous) to that of 0329 + 54 within the constellation Camelopardalis (5 million). The connection between one thing a lot bigger than humanity and the human virtuosity that realises and discovers lay on the coronary heart of an expertise that was nonetheless skilled as mesmerising, all-encompassing ritual. Pulse and pulsars got here and went. Sounds shifted as if in a reinvention of previous Klangfarbenmelodie. Time, as in, say, Wagner or Messiaen, appeared to be felt, even to maneuver otherwise: paradoxically, maybe, for one thing based conceptually and as work and efficiency upon exact measurement. The coup de théâtre, visible in addition to musical, of the placing and spinning of the central musical disc, the work’s solely observe with pitch, appeared in itself each a visualisation and auralisation in microcosm of concept and instantiation.

Motus proved estimable successors to Les Percussions de Strasbourg, who gave the primary efficiency in 1991 directed by the composer (as of their recording). Then, as now – as per Grisey’s directions – the six percussionists have been positioned across the viewers, as if in orbit round us, or no less than their sounds have been. The depth of musical understanding and listening between them was simply as spectacular because the overt virtuosity heard aplenty. This was the primary live performance for which I’ve been handed earplugs on arrival on the venue, however they have been fairly pointless for me, anyway, although maybe issues have been barely completely different for these seated nearer to one of many performers. I didn’t discover anybody utilizing them, however then nor was I trying. For this music of the spheres, each nothing and all the pieces was new below the solar(s).

Mark Berry