![]() ![]() If you listen to his Second Symphony, Le double, or his Violin Concerto, L'arbre des songes (the tree of dreams), you'll hear a rarefied, epicurean beauty that seems to exalt in its fluency and self-contained world of musical coherence. I even like the fact that he is no longer certain, but is a man riven by doubt, as we all should be.")ĭutilleux's anti-ideological approach to music history, his refusal to belong to or to establish a school of composition, despite his decades of teaching at the Paris Conservatoire, and his unashamed continuation of the concerns of earlier and not exclusively French traditions – Debussy, Ravel, Roussel, but also Stravinsky, and Bartók – has created some of the most poetically flexible music of recent decades. A few years later, Dutilleux told Jeffries that at the moment, "I have no problems with. But there are things I cannot accept, and I don't like people who are never in doubt." (Ironically, the richly decorative surfaces of some of Boulez's recent orchestral music approach – but do not surpass – the refinement and richness of Dutilleux's. ![]() He has made his choices and he has the right to make his choices. I admire his work for the Ensemble Intercontemporain. As Dutilleux told Stuart Jeffries in these pages a decade or so ago when a mere whippersnapper of 86, "I don't speak about him, and he doesn't speak about me. Dutilleux never accepted any of the dogmas of the avant-garde, above all, what Boulez called at one stage the necessity of serialism, a systemisation that's anathema to Dutilleux's creative sensibilities. Together, all of them, from his First Symphony, composed in 1951, to a recent masterpiece, Correspondances from 2003, which sets the letters of artists and writers from van Gogh to Rilke for soprano and orchestra, is proof of a fundamental sometimes little-understood truth about French musical life in the postwar period: there is another way apart from Pierre's (Boulez's, that is). There are two symphonies and other orchestral works, a handful of concertante pieces, a series of pieces for voice and orchestra, and a small but significant canon of chamber music, including a dazzling string quartet, Ainsi la nuit. I defy you not to be won over by this music.Īs one of music history's most fastidious perfectionists, Dutilleux's published works are few. ![]() It's music of sumptuous but rigorous splendour, music whose sheer attractiveness belies the refinement of Dutilleux's harmonic and structural imagination, and which seduces you into a faraway world of heightened feeling. But seeing as it's one of my favourites, we might as well start with his Cello Concerto, Tout un monde lointain, the visionary five-part piece he wrote for Mstislav Rostropovich in 1970. I could do this with any piece of Henri Dutilleux's, the French composer whose 97th birthday is this week. ![]()
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