SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

CONTACT!, Magnus Lindberg and Gérard Grisey: Magnus Lindberg (host), John Schaefer (host), Barbara Hannigan (soprano), Alan Gilbert (conductor), New York Philharmonic, Peter Jay Sharp Theatre at Symphony Space, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 19.11.2010 and 20.11.2010 (BH)

Magnus Lindberg: Souvenir (in memoriam Gérard Grisey) (2010, world premiere)

Gérard Grisey: Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (Four Songs for Crossing the Threshold) for soprano and ensemble (1997-1998)

Now and then a musical event happens that has “landmark” written all over it, and once again the fearless Alan Gilbert—with the assistance of composer-in-residence Magnus Lindberg and soprano Barbara Hannigan—led the New York Philharmonic in a concert worthy of the name. (I was so struck by the first hearing at Symphony Space, I decided to go again the next night to hear the same program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

Gilbert inaugurated the contemporary music series CONTACT! in 2009, but this installment was particularly arresting, starting with a world premiere by Mr. Lindberg, Souvenir (in memoriam Gérard Grisey) for large chamber ensemble. In three parts, Lindberg’s latest opus announces itself with dramatic chords, before dissolving into mesmerizing textures in the first part, slow washes of sound in the second, and a more animated final movement, here and there anchored by a low note on the bassoon, as the other instruments gambol about. The piece swells to its conclusion reaching a radiant glow of color, as if greeting Grisey in the hereafter. John Schaefer (the host for the first night) remarked, “This seems like your La Mer.”

Spectral music is perhaps the first major musical “school” made possible by the computer age (leaving aside electronic works in which computers actually create the sounds themselves). Gérard Grisey, and others such as Tristan Murail and André Dalbavie, analyzed the wave forms of sound—sometimes the properties of a single note—and used the resulting array of information as compositional arsenal. To Western ears used to tempered scales, spectralism can be a bit of a jump, with intriguingly pungent, microtonal harmonies. (NB: To the best of my knowledge, this was only the second microtonal work performed in the orchestra’s history. The first was in 2009, when guest conductor Ludovic Morlot led Tristan Murail’s Gondwana, a work evoking the vast processes in the creation of the earth.)

Scored for what Mr. Gilbert called “an unusual constellation of instruments,” Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (Four Songs for Crossing the Threshold) was Grisey’s final work, and he died before hearing it performed. It’s impossible not to assign some meaning to this tragic turn of events, given the work’s powerful content. Grisey culled texts from four very different sources, all dealing with death—physical extinction as well as the end of civilization—to create a monolith musing on the unknown and the imponderable. Consider this excerpt from the second song, “La mort de la civilization,” derived from Egyptian sarcophagal inscriptions, with the identifying numbers and parenthetical expressions left in to be sung, giving the text a peculiar, uncomfortable resonance:

811 and 812: (almost entirely disappeared)

814: “Now that you rest for eternity…”

809: (destroyed)

868 and 869: (almost entirely destroyed)

Astounding timbres were everywhere. Muted trumpet (the superb Matthew Muckey) repeatedly paired with the singer, camouflaging each other to the ear. A percussionist delicately swept the surface of a bass drum with a brush, barely at the edge of audibility. Small droplets of sound hovered, lingered, and fell into chasms, quietly disappearing in the distance. Passages felt like the entire ensemble was breaking up in extreme slow motion, melting into the air—all of which was superbly realized by the players, with Gilbert calmly, intently glued to the score as if he had discovered a long-buried tract.

Between the four songs Grisey places discreet yet insistent percussion interludes. In his words, “…insubstantial musical particles intended to maintain a level of tension slightly above the level of polite but slackened silence that takes over in concert halls, between the end of one movement and the beginning of the next.” The third one, “Faux interlude,” uses a soft yet insistent tapping—subdued, like someone knocking at a distant door to get attention—before evolving into a riveting cadenza-like episode for the entire percussion section. In the final song, “The Death of Humanity,” the soprano unleashes startling bursts of sound, as the ensemble dives into perhaps the work’s most violent barrages depicting “squalls, pelting rains, hurricanes, and flood,” before ending with soft, iridescent blurs.

The jaw-dropping Ms. Hannigan, last seen by many last spring as Gepopo in the Philharmonic’s groundbreaking production of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, has sung this piece many times and one could only observe her discipline in awe. Her extreme precision in intonation, grasping notes just microtones away from others, coupled with an actor’s ability to get inside Grisey’s grave skin, ultimately created an experience unlike any other this year. It didn’t hurt, either, that the auditorium emptied the stunned audience into the museum’s Egyptian art collection, a silent bridge back to the real world.

Before the performance, Lindberg offered a touching comment on Grisey: “Even the planet was not enough for him.” While his early death fills one with sadness, imagining what might have been, what he has given us is huge. Like those sarcophagi, Quatre chants feels like a sentry at an unmarked door, offering a sober, inscrutable glimpse into the past, and simultaneously far into the future.

Bruce Hodges