Tristan Murail – Territoires de l’oubli (1977) per piano solo – Marilyn Nonken piano.<\/p>\n
\u00c8 piuttosto difficile fare musica spettrale, basata sugli armonici e che spesso richiede quarti o anche sesti di tono, con il pianoforte, uno strumento a intonazione fissa, su cui l’esecutore non pu\u00f2 influire per nulla.<\/p>\n
L’unico modo \u00e8 attraverso le risonanze delle corde lasciate libere che entrano in vibrazione per simpatia ed \u00e8 quello che fa Murail in questo brano del ’77 che pu\u00f2 essere considerato quasi uno studio sulla risonanza, infatti il pedale \u00e8 costantemente premuto.<\/p>\n
Secondo me si tratta di un brano dalle sonorit\u00e0 affascinanti seppure un po’ manieristiche e “facili” al di l\u00e0 del fatto che sia riuscito, o meno, come musica spettrale, della quale ho gi\u00e0 avuto modo di criticare l’approssimazione.<\/p>\n
Notes di Julian Anderson tratte dal CD Accord AC4658992 che non \u00e8 quello di questa registrazione.<\/p>\n
Territoires de l’oubli was written in 1977 for the French composer-pianist Micha\u00ebl L\u00e9vinas, who gave the first performance in Rome, in 1978. This piece, Murail’s longest single-movement work to date, is a massive exploration of the piano’s resonance, unfolding in a huge curve of continuously evolving textures. Murail has remarked of the piece that “instead of considering the piano as a mere percussion instrument (hammers hitting strings), Territoires emphasizes a different idiomatic characteristic of the instrument: a group of strings whose vibration is caused by sympathetic resonance or by direct action of the hammers.” Murail further notes that the work is written “for the resonances, not the attacks which are considered as “scars” on the continuum.” For this reason, the sustaining pedal is held down throughout the entire piece. The work perpetually slides between regular, repetitive moments of stability, and chaotic, dense textures which often approach noise. The most stable moments often make a special feature of iambic, “heart-beat” rhythms. The work constantly plays upon the ambiguity between harmony and timbre – the harmony is chosen according to the resonance characteristics of the piano, producing several striking transformations of the piano’s sound: for example, at the end of the work, a form of “vibrato” is obtained by playing a fundamental simultaneously with an E-flat acting as its seventh harmonic. The true intonation of the seventh harmonic, heard in the resonance of the fundamental, beats against the equally tempered E-flat in the piano’s tuning. At several points in the piece, clusters of deep bass notes are heard, producing a mass of higher harmonics which form the basis of the harmony of the following section: in this way a continuous harmonic “chain” is built through out the work. The extreme continuity of Territoires does not prevent it from being one of Murail’s most evocative and dramatic pieces, especially in the wild cadenza of descending and ascending chords near the end.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n