An anniversary evening at the Cité de la Musique for Philippe Manoury, to whom the Ensemble Intercontemporain conducted by François-Xavier Roth offers a portrait concert featuring two world premieres.

The first is a commission for a 29-musician ensemble by patrons Françoise and Jean-Philippe Billarant and theEnsemble Intercontemporain. Grammaires du sonore is above all a concerto for soloists addressed to the members of the EIC, to whom Manoury feels close and whom he admires. It is an opportunity for him to enhance, if still possible, the virtuosity and color of each instrument, and even to integrate new ones, such as the saxhorn, the double-bell trumpet or the baritone oboe, with which the composer must have become familiar. Apart from the strings, which remain the wisest, each performer plays several instruments from the same family, from the piccolo to the bass flute, from the Eb clarinet to the contrabass clarinet, from the horn to the Wagner tuba, and so on. The arrangement of the instruments on stage, in "recomposed families", takes on decisive importance in tackling original combinations of timbre. A third of the way through the work, six wind instrumentalists (Wagnerian tubas, trumpets, trombones) leave the stage to parade upstairs, with that Stockhausenian theatrical dimension that invites the trombones in particular to perform certain gestures in space. The sonic jousting that ensues, akin to jazz riffs, is a thing of beauty. Electronic thinking also emerges from the instrumental writing, through the treatment of resonant percussion that extends and reverberates the instrumental figures. The delicate participation of the steel drums(Adélaïde Ferrière) creates a live hybridization of the ensemble's sonorities, as could, once again, a technological tool. The writing is dense and full of flashes, multiplying sound trajectories and stimulating the movement of figures in space and the vibratory tension of tutti.

François-Xavier Roth 's chiselled gesture works wonders, preserving the transparency and fluidity of movement while ensuring the organicity of the components, that underlying syntax - the grammar of sound - which arranges and organizes without curbing the primary energy.

As the title suggests, the Vier Lieder aus "Kein Licht", for mezzo-soprano and ensemble, are taken from Manoury's latest opera, Kein Licht, and given their world premiere tonight with Ukrainian singer Christina Daletska, who was present at the opera's premiere in 2017.

Manoury speaks of four Lamenti, the first three of which use texts by Elfriede Jelinek. The heavy shocks of the piano in the lower register (obtained by blocking the resonance of the string) set the dark color of these vocal pieces: Das Land bebt aber nicht vor Angst (The earth trembles but not with fear) sings Christina Daletska, whose long, radiant voice rises above the chiseled orchestration. Der Wind brings back Jelinek's verbal outbursts in an aria where the general movement seems to count more than the detail of the words. In Der alte König und das Meer (The Old King and the Sea), we hear the evocative power of the bass drum, combined here with the alto flute, a nod to Pierre Boulez and his Marteau sans Maître. Ô Mensch (from Nietzsche's Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra ) brings back the dark impact of the piano and a slow depression of the vocal and instrumental writing, in one of the score's most striking pages. 

Given in the second half of the concert, Fragments pour un portrait is a much older piece (1998), but written, like Grammaires du sonore, for the thirty soloists of the EIC and with the same luxuriant orchestration. The title refers to the paintings/studies by Francis Bacon, who produced several variations on Velásquez's Portrait of Innocent X. Fragments pour un portrait is divided into seven sequences and as many sound perspectives(Incantations, Choral, Vagues paradoxales, Nuit (avec turbulence), Ombres, Bagatelle, Totem), which must be heard as a whole, thanks to this "generative musical grammar" that enables him to shape the formal unity of the piece from within. Manoury has divided the ensemble into three triangular groups on the stage. While the two oboes responding to each other at the start of the work, fleshed out by very active percussion (celesta and anvils) distantly invoke Varèse, the slow movement, Nuit (with turbulence), the neuralgic center of the piece, looks more precisely towards Charles Ives and his famous Central Park in the Dark, playing on two spatio-temporal strata. The "distant music" is that of the four string soloists, who weave their continuous, unchanging fabric over which heterogeneous, discontinuous sound events are imprinted, "like hordes of birds flying through the night", as the composer points out: clattering percussion, brass riffs, wiggling woodwinds, crackling tumbas, the laryngeal growl of the contrabass clarinet (inimitable Alain Billard). The end of Nuit (with turbulence) is deferred until the seventh movement, Totem, where Manoury suspends listening to the resonance of three spinning cymbals. Unbounded sonic imagination and formal power are at work in this other Manoury masterpiece, which has not aged a day, and which its dedicatees have rendered this evening with prodigious élan and generosity.

Michèle Tosi

Philharmonie-Cité de la Musique, Paris
Concert hall on 9-12-2022
Philippe Manoury (b. 1952): Grammaires du sonore for 29 instruments (CM); Vier Lieder aus "Kein Licht" (CM); Fragments pour un portrait, for 30 instruments. Christina Daletska, mezzo-soprano; Ensemble Intercontemporain; conductor François-Xavier Roth.

Photos © Anne-Elise Grosbois
Photos © Quentin Chevrier