The following is an excerpt from:
Posted 2003-03-24
For decades, modern French composers have been devoted to
precisely the sort of stylistic purity and progressive ideology that Berlioz
disdained. But a recent concert of the music of Marc-André Dalbavie at the
Dalbavie, who is perhaps the most widely performed of French composers younger than fifty, has written a fair amount of music of the twittering, skittering, Boulezian kind. But the three pieces heard at the Guggenheim broke free of modernist clichés. “Palimpsest,” for violin, viola, cello, flute, clarinet, and piano, conjured an extraordinary variety of sounds from fragments of a Gesualdo madrigal, at one point erupting into furious scales right out of a Vivaldi concerto. “Sextine Cyclus” was a beautifully arranged though somewhat overextended anthology of medieval songs; Jean-Paul Fouchécourt sang them with loving eloquence, and members of the Orchestre de Paris provided a glistening accompaniment.
Most striking was “Chants,” for six singers and a chamber ensemble, based
on Ezra Pound’s adaptations of classical poetry and troubadour songs. This was
a world première, and a significant one. Tonality seemed to dissolve and reform
several times, as if a new language were struggling to be born. The splendid
vocalists of the 