Mark Andre - durch, zu, in & alsII

Mark Andre
‘durch’ (2004-5) for saxophone, percussion & piano
‘…zu…’ (2004) for string trio
‘…in’ (2002) for bass clarinet
‘…als…II’ (2001) for bass clarinet, cello & piano with live electronics
Kairos 0012732KAI

Mark Andre is a relatively little-known composer, French by birth but living in Germany, whose music combines very effectively influences from his two major teachers: Gérard Grisey and Helmut Lachenmann. From Grisey there is a deep exploration of the spectral aspect of sounds, and from Lachenmann the radical re-working of the instruments themselves in a “musique concrete instrumentale”.

The majority of Andre’s works are scored for the same few instruments, all of which he has studied in depth from an acoustic and scientific point of view: bass clarinet, piano, cello, cymbalon & some percussion. That these instruments are played in unconventional ways is partly the influence of Lachenmann, but is primarily to an extraordinary interest in the possibilities of physical sound. Andre’s scores are daunting in that in addition to the parameters of pitch and duration, he specifies in detail (and develops systems of notation for) factors such as position of the bow, pressure of the bow or hand on fingerboard etc. Moreover he works very precisely with microintervals, and requests of the wind players, for example, that they should be able to sob into the mouthpiece with various specific degrees of intensity.

Fortunately on this disc his works are played by some of the finest interpreters of contemporary music – the ensemble recherche and the Trio Accanto, all of whom make the music appear only ordinarily difficult to perform.

‘durch’ starts with single punched notes from saxophone, drum and piano. Those who know Andre’s earlier works (such as Un-Fini & Ab II) will not be surprised that there is plenty of use of the piano’s body and strings, but in the first half at least there are also little runs on the keyboard, but – characteristically – these short bursts quickly become blocked or die away, and the music soon returns to single notes punctuating silence. As the percussionist moves onto metal percussion, the underlying silence is replaced by an underlying ringing or resonance of bowed cymbals, gongs and tam-tam. The soprano sax starts to play longer tones, and the music settles into a rather beautiful balance between high and low pitches, short and sustained notes and loud and quiet tones. Then suddenly in the last few minutes of the piece its character changes again. The sustained percussion sounds die away, the pianist abandons the keys to make sad squeaky sounds rubbing glass on the piano strings and the saxophonist plays predominantly long tones that increasingly fade off into silence. Then this decays further into indistinct pianissimo scraping sounds, making a very forlorn but extraordinary and beautiful conclusion to a fascinating piece.

‘…zu…’ also starts from silence, with very soft sustained glissandi from the string trio. But from about a minute in these ethereal bowed tones are interrupted by harsh grating sounds as the bow pressure is suddenly increased. The whole has a fractured feel not dissimilar to Lachenmann’s Gran Torso (his first string quartet in which not a single note is played conventionally), though with a more fragile underbelly. Rather surprisingly the title – a very truncated biblical quotation, as all the titles are - refers to paradise (‘von Ewigkeit zu Ewigkeit’, ‘for ever and ever’). But for me the damaged, threatened mood of the piece, though extremely powerful, has nothing paradisial about it.

‘…in’ has been issued before as part of the ‘Witten In Nomine Broken Consort Book’, an occasion from the Witten Festival for New Chamber Music when about 40 composers submitted short pieces which took as their starting-point a short fragment by the Renaissance composer John Tavener. This is a new recording, again by the brilliant clarinettist Shizuyo Oka, and it’s interesting to hear it away from its original context, but in the company of three other compositions by Andre. It very much fits the pattern of his current work. The clarinet is subjected to a challenging workout with countless extended techniques, but all at a slow pace with the emphasis predominantly on sustained notes. The clarinet is positioned next to an open piano, whose strings resonate and gently transform the notes’ decay. The whole is played against and ultimately merges into an underlying silence. Very lovely restrained music.

Finally ‘…als II…’ which starts with ominous low thumps and rumbles from the piano, whose bass strings have been prepared / deadened with plasticine. The biblical quotation this time is from The Book of Revelations (“And when the lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.”) Again for me the quotation and the feel of the piece are very different. Rather than a heavenly silence, ‘…als II…’ again evokes a rather threatening landscape in which the muffled thuds of the piano combine with breathy sounds and multiphonics on the clarinet and a low scraping in a very limited pitch-range from the cello. It is beautiful enthralling music, but hardly heavenly. The live electronics are used lightly to amplify and project the low volumes around (and above) the audience, who form a circle outside of which the performers play in a triangular formation. I have not seen the work performed, but it must be quite an experience. Whilst clearly the three instruments are combined very carefully, it also appears that each player works independently, absorbed in the construction or exploration of their own restricted soundworld. And the amplification of the sounds must feel like the projection of an internal, almost private space. Again the music undergoes an extraordinary collapse in the final few minutes into a realm of indistinct soft sounds, suggesting another shadow world lying tantalisingly just beyond the boundaries of that strange one that the rest of the piece has so effectively created.

All in all a beautiful disc, both confirming Mark Andre as one of the leading composers of his generation, and suggesting that his work is still developing in fascinating ways. Perhaps his next works will take us further into that quiet fractured space that the endings of three of these pieces evoke.