Le Noir de l’Étoile
Christoph Sietzen, Leonhard Schmidinger, Nico Gerstmayer, Akisato Takeo, Miguel Llorente Gil, Lorenzo Manquillet (percussion)
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| Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli |
Having emerged from Georg Friedrich Haas’s Koma at the Mozarteum, the chance for a breath of fresh air and a quick beer in the shadow of Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach’s Kollegienkirche was a happy one, prior to entering the church for further musical liminality, in the form of Gérard Grisey’s Le Noir de l’Étoile from Motus Percussion, led by Christoph Sietzen. Although the two performances were not formally connected, save as part of the Festival’s Ouverture Spirituelle, it is difficult to believe there was not some intent in the scheduling; at any rate, it made for an illuminating journey to travel from the absolute darkness of Haas’s coma opera to the starry sky of Grisey’s work for six percussionists, tape, and electronics.
The skies have of course fascinating and inspired composers and other artists from the dawn of time, but there is something very much of its time to Grisey’s idea and realisation, resting as it does on the 1967 discovery of signals emitted by pulsars, a class of neutron star, residue of supernova explosions, whose spin is with regular rapidity picked up with every rotation. (For this, I am indebted to helpful programme notes by Jean-Pierre Liminet, whose introductory text is sometimes read out prior to performance, and Tim Rutherford-Johnson.) The science is fascinating, insofar as I understand it, and played a crucial, indeed determining role in the conception, born of Grisey’s friendship whilst teaching at Berkeley with the astrophysicist Joseph Silk. But ultimately, it is the musical work and its performance that we experience, albeit with the intervention of a pulsar recording that seems both to confirm and to correct the dizzying array of untuned percussion we have previously heard.
Tempi and time interacted on an extraordinary musical journey – Stockhausen, who inevitably comes to mind, eat our heart out – they formed and were framed by, from now to the Vela pulsar (12,000 years old) to that of 0329 + 54 in the constellation Camelopardalis (5 million). The relationship between something so much larger than humanity and the human virtuosity that realises and discovers lay at the heart of an experience that was nonetheless experienced as mesmerising, all-encompassing ritual. Pulse and pulsars came and went. Sounds shifted as if in a reinvention of old Klangfarbenmelodie. Time, as in, say, Wagner or Messiaen, seemed to be felt, even to move differently: ironically, perhaps, for something founded conceptually and as work and performance upon precise measurement. The coup de théâtre, visual as well as musical, of the striking and spinning of the central musical disc, the work’s only note with pitch, seemed in itself both a visualisation and auralisation in microcosm of idea and instantiation.
Motus proved estimable successors to Les Percussions de Strasbourg, who gave the first performance in 1991 directed by the composer (as in their recording). Then, as now – as per Grisey’s instructions – the six percussionists were placed around the audience, as if in orbit around us, or at least their sounds were. The intensity of musical understanding and listening between them was just as impressive as the overt virtuosity heard aplenty This was the first concert for which I have been handed earplugs on arrival at the venue, but they were quite unnecessary for me, anyway, though perhaps matters were slightly different for those seated closer to one of the performers. I did not notice anyone using them, but then nor was I looking. For this music of the spheres, both nothing and everything was new under the sun(s).
