André Jolivet, Chamber Music
The instrumentation of the music in this fascinating program of André Jolivet's chamber music by the Danish group MidtVest might make one think of his slightly older contemporaries, the composers of Les Six. He was only six years younger than Auric and Poulenc, for example. But Jolivet's music is in most cases less pastoral, less nostalgic, hearkening back to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, rather than that master's neo-classical works.
Jolivet was a pupil of Varèse and a friend of Messiaen, and after World War II he experimented with modal music and complex rhythms. At the same time, though, the one-time "outsider" artist entered the Parisian musical establishment, when he became the music director for the Comédie-Française, from 1945-1959. Jolivet is a fascinating composer who straddles various trends in French music, bouncing between pastoralism and urbanism, between impressionism, modernism and the avant garde. He ends up being a kind of compex avatar for a fairly broad range of music in the middle of the century.
The Petite Suite for Flute, Viola and Harp utilizes the same instruments as Debussy's 1915 Trio. Though World War I was already underway when he began, Debussy's sound-world seems one of innocent joy compared with Jolivet's piece, which was written during the German Occupation of Paris in 1941. The mood is grimmer and the music is sometimes gritty and desperate. But we take what consolation we can in music - especially in French music - and Jolivet ends with a lusty peasant dance, though one that's perhaps more than a bit manic.
In his very helpful liner notes, Paul Griffiths explains what's happening in Jolivet's Controversia for oboe and harp, written for Heinz and Ursula Holliger in 1968.
He employed glissandos (straight and trilled), bisbigliandos (rapid alternations between normal fingering and an alternative giving the same note as a harmonic) and multiphonics (sonorities of two or more notes together – here two a fifth apart – again produced by special fingerings). At the same time he introduced harp sonorities he had learned from Carlos Salzedo, such as ‘timpani sounds’ made by tapping on the soundboard and quarter-tone tuning, or glissandos elicited by sliding the tuning key on the string, these soon joined by ‘timpani sounds’.
Oboist Peter Kirstein and harpist Gesine Dreyer are outstanding in this piece, which seems both timeless and completely rooted in the late sixties. As Jolivet said on his first visit to America in 1964, "I wrote atonal music for thirty years. Nobody suspected it until I told them. There are only two ways of writing atonal music. Either you shout it from the housetops, in which case it ceases to be music, or you just use it."
It's part of the genius of French music and the magic of Christmas that something as beautiful as André Jolivet's Pastorales de Nöel for Flute, Bassoon and Harp could have been written in the dark year of 1943. It's about the birth of Christ, but with his Crucifixion never far from mind; the music balances hope and despair. This entire disc, played with French flair by these fine Danish musicians, gives a wonderful picture of a composer who plotted his own personal path through the always changing world of mid-20th century music.
The cover painting is Landscape from Bretagen (1889) by Paul Gauguin.
