In my experience Claude Vivier had always been this somewhat obscure Canadian Stockhausen disciple, who lived his life on the edge, and died accordingly. This DVD production by Dutch new music champion Reinbert de Leeuw and stage director Pierre Audi changed this view completely. Rêves d'un Marco Polo is something like a 3-layered in-depth introduction to this fascinating composer. It made me recognize Vivier as one of the truly original voices of the 20th century.

First there is the construction of Marco Polo, an imaginary Vivier opera, assembled from the most important works from the composer's last period: Prologue pour un Marco Polo (1981), Shiraz (1977), Lonely Child (1980), Zipangu (1980), Wo bist du, Licht! (1981) and Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele (1983). The idea of performing some of these works in one operatic setting even seems to have been proposed by Vivier himself.

Next an extra dimension is added by staging Marco Polo as counterpart to Vivier's opera Kopernikus from 1979. Together these two parts - inseparable opposites like shadow and light - form what the editors have named "Rêves d'un Marco Polo - opéra fleuve en deux parties". The obvious thematic and musical relationship between the parts is further emphasized by Vivier's typical use of a self-invented fantasy language.

Finally, to complement the picture, Claude Vivier and his music are presented in a broader perspective by two documentaries: "an introduction to Marco Polo" and Cherry Duyns' TV documentary "Claude Vivier".

Reinbert de Leeuw leads inspired, well focused performances and Pierre Audi's stage setting is, appropriately, both sober and bizarre. The final result is a musical- as well as human document of a man who lived and composed out of the same passion. Claude Vivier's music deals with life, love, compassion and death. It's theatrical, ritual, physical and - in a quiet way - overwhelming.

Rated:

perlix (121 reviews)

“Treatise” is the Mount Everest of graphic notation. Graphic notation is basically were a composer uses non-traditional symbols to explain how a piece has to be preformed. There is no limit to what these symbols can or can’t be. A composer doesn’t even have to explain what they mean. He can for instance use colours or written text.
The score for “Treatise” consists of 193 pages of all sort of symbols. Generally eschewing anything even closely resembling a note. Information concerning what instruments or the number of players that have to be used is completely absent. Important pieces of information concerning the piece are usually completely or partially absent. Things like duration, tempo or pitch aren’t mentioned. If they are they are mentioned in very unorthodox ways that can be interpreted in a wide variety of ways. The whole piece is like a puzzle but it doesn’t have a fixed solution but rather an almost infinite number of solutions. The following website has a very nice and clear illustration about how one could possible go about deciphering the piece:    
http://www.blockmuseum.nor...ages/anim.html

This recording is the only complete recording of the piece that you can get. It would be interesting to also hear other performances of the piece considering how greatly they can vary. It has been mentioned that this isn’t a complete recording given that the ensemble takes an average of 3 minutes to read a page. Which is rather quick considering how complex the instructions generally are if you can call them instruction at all. I have no intention to call them liars and I attribute their speed to the fact that they use a lot of unspecified electronics for this performance. Which could potentially speed up the whole deal.

A way to perform the piece is to use a program that converts image to sound and just input the score. Something like AudioPaint or the ANS-synthesiser. No idea if anyone has ever done this before.

The version that is presented here is quit possibly the most abstract piece of music that I have come across so far. There is not only no melody, harmony, patterns but also no drones an overlying idea of any kind. Or anything like the Twelve-tone technique or some other similar method or technique. These just sounds like random sounds. No patterns even emerge during the whole duration of the piece unlike you would expect. Just very brief seeming and possibly random sounds. Yet the whole thing is absolutely fascinating and captivating. There just is something about this piece. Maybe it is just my fascination for sound.

Rated:

77ships (215 reviews)

The Aryan replicant Roy Batty, boasting just before switching off claims:
“I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain... Time to die.”

I reply to the ‘repli’: “I listened to the Solar Trilogy at dawn, in the Autumn, by the shores of the Baltic Sea, on a lost little island dotted by Viking graves. The music made me see the glowing remains of the attack ships falling off Orion’s shoulder, while the C-beams near the Tannhauser gate made a rococo mess of light only professional fireflies manage to do. All those moments had to be lost in time; I didn't want to share them with anyone else. But at least in one thing we agree, Roy: it was a perfect time to die”.
Replicants should take mp3 players to their missions. And they should listen to the Solar Trilogy…

Technically speaking, this is a fine piece of atonal engineering where a triptych hologram sits over a (Richard) Straussian common denominator. Therefore, a non-atonal basis works a launch pad for the most delirious atonal manoeuvres where the first episode (no, it is not movement as we see in symphonies), Gong, sounds Scelsi-enesque and atonal-clusters are clearly identifiable. The second episode sounds Mahlerian, -- but a you have to imagine a keyless Mahler, as if he had undertaken the atonal leap he enabled other composers to undertake -- in the mood of the Funeral March found in his Second Symphony. The third episode, Corona – the halo that appears around the sun during total eclipse -- is Schnittkenesque and, as such, insane, indescribable (a trumpet a la Miles in Filles de Kilimanjaro goes on as if the jazz club were buried under tons of earth after an earthquake that is still happening, and nobody in there took notice).  
Now, this is a kind of compendium including a handful of composers who are among my favourites at a rare level of innovation and accomplishment.
Highly recommended.

Rated:

docperkins (840 reviews)

Very impressive recording of this pompous symphony, which aggregates bold design, sophistication, intransigence, comprehensibility, self-assuredness, energy, delicacy, grandezza, as only very few other large symphonic compositions from the 20th century do. The Turangalîla symphony clearly belongs to the essential symphonic compositions from the 20th century. Strangely, the Turangalîla-Symphonie often reminds me of Gershwin and other American codes ...
The prominent parts are played by Peter Donohoe and Tristan Murail.

And then, there's a great performance of the Quatuor pour la fin du temps, with performances by Saschko Gawriloff, Siegfried Palm, Hans Deinzer, and Aloys Kontarsky, in itself a reason to buy this album.

Rated:

yofriend (2025 reviews)

I recently heard a disc-long excerpt of Feldman's second string quartet, from the Flux Quartet recording. I liked what I heard very much: it felt light and breezy, like a parched desert landscape cooling down in late evening shadows. Plain muted strings were blending into one instrument in a continuous discovery of hoarse, earthy sonorities. Most importantly of all, the music was an astonishing contrast to For Philip Guston, a work I'd been digging into during the previous four months, and it instantly became clear to me that I am now as capable as I'll ever be of evaluating the latter: the way I'm hearing it is the way it sounds, and it's not going to start sounding any better.

For Philip Guston is like a funereal music box built out of a rusted Ferris wheel in an abandoned fairground that turns at ten inches a minute for four hours, and you listen to its chiming from across a bay - or like a gigantic dollhouse that covers two or three walls of a decades-uninhabited kids' room, floor to ceiling, and inches of dust cover the dozens and dozens of tiny rooms all furnished with miniature chairs and tables, microscopic tableware and mildewed printed carpets half the size of napkins.  It's gloomy, depressing, sentimental and crumbles under the weight of its atmosphere.

Any of the first three discs alone is as enjoyable as anything I've heard from Feldman, but once I go past the two hour mark, it starts to turn more and more suffocating until I can't bear to focus on the music any more. Even in small doses the melancholic character pushing through the more diatonic writing makes me feel vaguely embarrassed listening to it. The clear, chiming, nearly minor key figures are sometimes like in Labradford or Brian Eno. Music for Existential Airports? Not the terminals where people board planes, but the ones where their loved ones do, with the knowledge they'll never meet again. All that pain is within reach in my own livingroom if I just hit play and sit still. I'd rather not, really.

Rated:

darsu (121 reviews)

When I first listened to this album, I set my Sonos system erroneously to play the tracks in alphabetical order, starting with “Babulya.” Incidentally, “Babulya” turned out to be the album’s weirdest song by far, but somehow it was perfect to put me into the right mood. The only thing I can come up with to try and describe this track’s effect—though more by analogy than any kind of tangible similarity—is Neil Young’s distorted and disturbing guitar accompaniment to Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, floating in and out with the rhythm of the train that transports “William Blake” across endless progressions of cheerless landscapes to a goodness-forsaken place where the only thing that’s kept in store for him are ever more travels and travails of utter senselessness, on a trajectory into the bleakest territories of the land and of the mind. And even if correctly played as the album’s third track instead of its first, “Babulya” serves said purpose of setting the mood exceptionally well—the only difference being that after the first two tracks one might be inclined to feel existentially safe, in the sense of “belonging to” or “having arrived at” a safe or at least familiar place, after which “Babulya” guarantees a rude awakening not unlike that experienced by Blake when he arrives at the place quite aptly called “Machine.” And indeed, both the next-to-last track “Lilovyi Den,” the album’s title song, and the final track “Yakorya” are again strongly rhythmically reminiscent of a train ride into nothingness.

Bleak territories of the land and of the mind, indeed, seem to be what this album is about. I say “seem” because I don’t have the faintest idea of what the lyrics are about. These might be traditional folk lyrics or poems by the modernist poet Alexander Vvedensky of whom Fedorov is exceptionally fond—and who, according to Wikipedia, considered his late-avantgarde poetry as “a critique of reason more powerful than Kant’s." And of unreasonableness, there’s indeed plenty on this album to be found. For me, personally, this overall effect of dislocation—things being not quite where they should be, or willfully disregarding Aristotle’s law of identity—is introduced by the album’s scales and tunes which always feel vaguely familiar but never settle in that “familiar place” mentioned above—it’s as if Yiddish folk tunes, originating from my expectations, were accelerated in a Large Harmony Collider to near-light speed and smashed against the Russian folk tunes originating from the album, leaving me to sort out what’s really happening by analyzing the debris. But even without this rather idiosyncratic interference, there’s plenty of what can be called solidly “off” even by far less subjective assessments. Fedorov’s voice slightly trails in key and meter as if constantly bogged down by a strong gravitational field; the tuning of his steel-string acoustic guitar is struggling and straining to meet the songs’ respective keys; and the samples—sometimes staying menacingly in the background, sometimes infiltrating the song and bending and transforming its texture in scary ways, sometimes invading aggressively and taking over like the signal from a nearby and more powerful radio station—are completely off in genre, mood, and style. Now if that happens to sound suspiciously like an art folk equivalent to a Concerto grosso piece by Alfred Schnittke, yes, that’s what comes to mind. Here too, all these seemingly unrelated and wildly incongruous pieces skillfully, magically, integrate into artistic unity.

What can I say. I’m always reluctant to apply this attribute to popular music, but there’s enough lucidly executed madness in Fedorov’s Lilovyi Den to bring it close to what can be called a masterpiece.

gyokusai (10 reviews)

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