Vive La Différence (Electronic)

In Tristan Murail's music, the tempo is generally slow, and the whole composition is a gradual exploring of a particular sound world, even of a particular sound. The sequence of separated sounds at the beginning of his Bois Flotté gave the impression that a stick was being drawn again and again through muddy water, reconfiguring the same silky texture. Sounds of diverse kinds—live instrumental, electronically transformed, adapted from recordings—were held in the same place, loosely but together. Strings whispered much on the surface, while a trombone reinforced the bass notes and thereby gave a strong actuality and presence to the harmonic spectrums with which Murail is characteristically concerned.

As the work progressed, so it seemed to come into itself, growing to a point where the violin could set out on melodies suggestive of the French chamber music of a century ago. There was no stylistic disruption. Murail's spectrums are cousins to the elaborate, almost immobile harmonies of Fauré or Chausson, and his electronic appurtenances give him access to the same pleasure in sound.

That pleasure was discovered again, at the end of the concert, in his Esprit des Dunes, for a larger ensemble but a similar instrumental-electronic mélange. The effect is more orchestral, the impressive climactic moments coming not with a quiet violin solo but with clangorous sounds that envelop—not quite completely—the instruments, as if flute, cello and the rest were sticking out from the sides of a great bell. 

Magnus Lindberg was strongly represented by his Ur, in which an ensemble rather like that of Murail's Bois Flotté is used in quite a different way. Here the electronic treatment gives the instruments bigger voices; violin and double bass have the heft of brass as their darting lines answer each other and collide. There is the heat, if nothing else, of jazz in what they do, and in the clarinet's breaks.

At the same time the dynamic, harmonic and timbral changes created by the electronics appear to set up false perspectives, so that the instruments will seem to be rushing backward but getting bigger, or charging away but staying in the same place. The Ensemble Sospeso, playing excellently under Jeffrey Milarsky, gave a gripping, forceful account of the piece. 

Related Rocks, which Lindberg wrote in 1997, 11 years after Ur, was by contrast smiling and playful, with a lighter energy. Pairs of pianists and percussionists race and stop through glittering music that evokes Bali from time to time, arrives at a cartoon-style chase, and dances nonchalantly into B-flat major. 

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