Pierre Boulez Conducts The Domaine Musical Ensemble

The Domaine Musical Ensemble - Pierre Boulez Conducts The Domaine Musical Ensemble

Excerpts from the liner notes:

Arnold Schoenberg - Verklaerte Nacht, Op. 4

Arnold Schoenberg composed the string sextet VERLAERTE NACHT in three weeks during a holiday he took in September of 1899, when he was twenty five years old. The premiere performance took place in Vienna in 1903. Together with Guerrelieder and the symphonic poem Pelleas at Melisande, Verklaerte Nacht is one of the most significant works of Schoenberg's first creative period, full of the flamboyant expressiveness traceable across the metamorphosis of his musical language and that of the Vienna School. Undeniably, there are traces here of Wagner: harmonically, we are reminded of Tristan. The specific nature of Schoenberg's chromaticism, however, unlike Wagner's is linear and transcends tonal control.
Although cast in a unified mould, Verkaerte Nacht is in five parts that follow closely the construction of the poem by Richard Dehmel, that inspired the work. On the one hand, the work is rhythmically unstable and modulates constantly when the two persons express themselves (the woman's confession, etc.). On the other hand, when presenting the idea of place (moonlit universe, gently starlit night, etc.) the tonalities become fixed and rhythms more stable.
The work is often performed in Schoenberg's own transcription for string orchestra, but the version here presented is the original one for string sextet.

Jean-Claude Eloy - Equivalences

The title "Equivalences" refers to numerous aspects of the piece and should be interpreted in the sense of an equilibrium between contrasting forces. In the simplest terms, there is the deployment of musical instruments: A triple symmetry in an arc formed by 6 percussionists, 3 groups of winds and piano-celesta with harp. On a higher plane, we may regard it as a depiction of the contrasting elements that make up the work; density: zero to maximum; registers: fixed to mobile; coordination: absolute to relative, etc. The whole form itself reflects these oppositions, this dialectic play, whence derives a contrasting sonority, an extension of the dynamic field.
Certain structures are variable from one performance to another, utilizing modifiable intensities that affect mainly the duration of the percussion instruments' resonances, to illustrate: a contrast is created between wind instruments producing long held sounds on the one hand, and on the opposite side are percussion instruments, piano, harp, etc., producing sounds of rapid growth and decay. Bit by bit, these sounds are drawn closer until they are confronted. The movement continues, until the sounds are at their initial state, but on opposite sides: the winds producing "pointed" sounds, while the percussion instruments, by means of complicated trills, etc., produce long held sounds. Henri Pousseur describes this development as an "arc of duration".
Equivalences had its premiere performance at the Darmstadt Festival in July 1963 under the direction of Pierre Boulez.

Henri Pousseur - Madrigal III

HENRI POUSSEUR was born at Malmedy, Belgium in 1929. He studied at the Liege and Bruxelles Conservatoires from 1947 to 1953. From 1954 to 1957 he worked at the electronic music studios of Radio Cologne and Milano. He is co-founder and, since 1958, director of the APELAC studio in Bruxelles. He has authored important theoretical works on contemporary music, and has given lecture cycles at Darmstadt and other centres.
Madrigal III for clarinet, violin, cello, 2 percussion instruments and piano was composed in the spring of 1962 and dedicated to the memory of Wolfgang Steinecke, since 1945 the daring promoter of the Darmstadt Festival.
This work comprises almost all of Madrigal I, written four years earlier for clarinet solo. For Pousseur, the earlier work represented a first and almost unconscious attempt to reactivate the harmonic values that post-Webernian music had almost neutralized. Pousseur made a more resolute attempt in this direction in Votre Faust. In Madrigal III, this reactivation is still dependent on dodecaphonic material, and crystalizes around a process of frequent and variable repetition of the constituent notes of an harmonic "field".

Tracklisting:

SIDE 1

1. Arnold Schoenberg - Verklaerte Nacht, Op. 4 {28:27}

SIDE 2

1. Jean-Claude Eloy - Equivalences {8:28}

2. Henri Pousseur - Madrigal III {12:00}

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