Search - Durand, Livtwin, Schoenberg :: Piano Concertos / String Trio

A fantastic disc, unfortunately out of print

Jeremy Glazier | Columbus, OH | 04/22/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This disc showcases three relatively early works by Joel Francois Durand: a string trio, a string sextet, and a piano concerto. The string trio (1980-81), the earliest listed work in Durand's catalogue, is a serial work--a student paying tribute to the great teachers who have inspired and ushered him into the musical world: Ferneyhough, Berio, Nono, etc. It is a beautiful piece, with striking pizzicato and other dramatic string effects, but Durand is not inherently a serialist, and the remaining pieces on this disc demonstrate his search for an idiom more compatible with his nature.



The string sextet (1988) is clearly a part of that search. By cutting and pasting (literally, according to the notes) parts from the string trio, and rearranging the material for twice as many players, Durand offers a compelling testimony of someone who in less than decade was able to transform his compositional practice from a kind of copy-cat serialism into something much more fluid and original. The piece is long (over 24 minutes compared to the trio's 7), and sounds almost nothing like its source material; the music has not just revised but transfigured. It is a transfiguration coming nearly 90 years after Schonberg's own sextet, Verklarte Nacht, and the younger work seems to owe as much to Schonberg's youthful searching and his faith in the power of the imagination to recreate the world in its own image as it does to any poststructural leanings Durand may have learned from Ferneyhough.



The real achievement on this disc is the piano concerto, a substantial work that shows the composer blossoming into a maturity and a voice all his own. The liner notes suggest Elliott Carter's piano concerto as the closest aesthetic model, and that comparison is certainly helpful in locating Durand's sensibility (Carter seems more present to me in this recording than Ferneyhough or Berio). But where Carter's concerto opens up an aggressive, revolutionary sound space somewhere between the classical and the romantic models of the concerto form, Durand's seems to me much more lushly romantic, and no less beautiful or challenging for it. Here Durand seems worlds away from the string trio, breathing comfortably the air of his own planet.

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