Reading Gérard Grisey’s programme notes on his masterpiece Vortex Temporum is not the most agreeable experience. The reader is informed that the work is structured around ‘three basic forms’: ‘the original event – a sinusoidal wave – and two continuous events, an attack with or without resonance as well as a sound held with or without crescendo’. It transpires that there is also an ‘imagined microscope’, thanks to which ‘the notes become sound, a chord becomes a spectral complex, and rhythm transforms into a wave of unexpected duration’.
I don’t know what any of this means, and I have read it several times. Presumably it meant something fairly specific to Grisey, but what he really hoped to communicate through writing it down is lost to me. I enjoyed the piece, though; that was great.
That Grisey was very intelligent is clear enough from the quotations above. What may be less obvious – and the same goes here with regard to any number of other ‘difficult’ composers – is that Grisey’s obsession with dryness and inscrutability in prose is completely at odds with the incredible richness and warmth of his music.
Vortex Temporum may well have been composed using any number of arcane and complex formulae, but what concerned Grisey – possibly all that concerned Grisey – was the sound that his experiments produced. The work’s three movements each unfolded with an impossibly sure sense of structure, exploding the opening notes into strange, beautiful forms. On Monday, these huge and bizarre blocks of sound filled Shoreditch Church, courtesy of London Contemporary Orchestra with conductor Hugh Brunt, as part of the Spitalfields Winter Music Festival. It was an impeccable performance of a draining, epic, enthralling piece.
Grisey makes much use of microtonal tunings in the piece, even requiring adjustments to the piano, but it was remarkable how organically integrated the quarter- and eighth-tones were into the sound. Harmonically the piece came across as a radical extension of the soundworld of Ravel – from whom the opening sonority was borrowed – and perhaps also Ligeti, a teacher of Grisey's. Ligeti may also be a point of reference for the performative self-awareness of this work. Pushing constantly at the limits of the audible or comprehensible, Grisey frequently requires his string players (single violin, viola and cello) to bow silently or almost-silently, as if straining for something impossible, producing little more than the sound of the bow brushing against the string.
A couple of times, this odd, ecstatic gesture followed enormous, thick crescendi, surprisingly forming moments of real theatricality. Grisey’s concern for the effect of his piece – both musical and dramatic – was never in doubt, and the incredible polish of LCO’s performance enhanced this enormously. A standout moment was the first movement’s long, insanely testing piano solo, played meticulously and energetically by Antoine Françoise. Incredibly detailed and intense, this solo climaxed with enormous, shocking cluster chords. It was something like a musical version of Lucky’s long soliloquy in Waiting for Godot, but as if all of Lucky’s frantic phrases were anagrams of each other.