Customer Reviews

Philippe Manoury: Fragments pour un portrait; Partita No. 1

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The French composer Philippe Manoury has had a long association with IRCAM, and indeed his works have displayed bold new technology developed at that institute. In the 1980s, he wrote the series of pieces "Sonus ex machina" (hear it here and here) where a human performer dialogued with a tape part, but a computer followed the performer's movements and adapted the electronic material to his or her individual style.

On this Kairos disc, "Partita I" for viola and electronics (2006) shows that score-following software hasn't evolved much; the computer can now detect the soloist's bow pressure and accelerations, but otherwise the combination of man and machine sounds little different from two decades earlier. However, Philippe Manoury has made some strides as a composer. This nine-part suite moves through some varied sonic landscapes and has an engaging form, so I'm no longer inclined to think of Manoury as an experimenter who only lays down rough electronic material that other, better composers can exploit later. The fifth movement is a fascinating dialectic between bow and pizzicato playing, and the sixth a whirlwind of activity. The final movement presents beautiful spectral harmonies and even a veiled reference to the Romantic tradition.

Christophe Desjardins was the dedicatee of this work and we can assume that he presents a reliable reading of "Partita I". The only downside of this stereo CD recording is that it cannot represent the spatialization of the work, instead representing highly spatialized passages as a simple alteration between left and right channels that can be a bit annoying.

Everything I had heard to date from Manoury employed electronics, but "Fragments pour un portrait" (1998) contents itself with the acoustic forces of 34 musicians. Lots of contemporary music is compared to Debussy because of some reliance on lush textures and focus on timbre, but this piece is Debussyean in that it seems a downright sequel to that composer's orchestral "Images". Oh, sure, Manoury is sometimes looking at Debussy through the lens of 1960s serialism, but the bell tones, pounding drums and evocation of great luminous spaces aren't far away from the Spanish festivals and sultry nights of that work from a century ago. It's a fun piece, and though it is unlikely to reach the average concertgoer because of its comparative lack of "tunes", it's hard to call the music dissonant and avant-garde.

Manoury's "Fragments" are seven in number: I. Incantations, II. Choral, III. Vagues paradoxales, IV. Nuit (avec turbulences), V. Ombres, VI. Bagatelle and VII. Totem. In terms of musical flow and even basic vocabulary it anticipates Bruno Mantovani's "Le Sette Chiese" (hear it on a Kairos disc). Consequently, if he was exploring a now hip genre years before others, I'm now less inclined to view Manoury as a perennially second-rate composer. I think this disc will appeal to many fans of contemporary music.