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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Modernist music at its most accessible, 20 April 2005
Maurice Ohana (1914-1992) is still not very well known outside of France, and that is the rest of the world's loss. "Tombeau de Claude Debussy" (composed 1961/2 for the centenary of Debussy's birth) is one of his masterpieces. It exhibits many of his compositional trademarks, such as the dense chords and blocks of sound you hear at the very start, and the delicate use of tuned percussion and the exotically-tuned zither. The general atmosphere is a good deal more sinister than in Debussy (it owes more to Pierre Boulez if anyone), and like Debussy's pieces the titles of each section provoke the listener's imagination and enhance the piece no end. Part 3, "Ballad of the Great War", features a military march with a distorted Marseillaise; it is a particularly dark section. Part 4, "Other Suns", features some of Ohana's mellifluous piano parts, as explored in later works (see "Piano Music" - available on Amazon - for one of them) Part 5, "Mirror Asleep", could almost be film music; it sounds like the sountrack to a forgotten nightmarish Disney film from about 1945. Part 6, "Wind and Rain Compass Card" (this is what the booklet says), is classic Ohana; full of shifting rhythms and textures, with about 30 seconds of percussion madness in the middle, followed by a beautiful section similar to a pastoral romance spoiled by an encroaching thunderstorm. The whole piece coheres together nicely and does not sag once in its whole duration. The only thing I don't like is the singing - I tend to skip the parts with singing (1, 4 and 7). But that's probably just me. It really is a masterpiece.The other two pieces were written in the late 1960s and show many hallmarks of the era. "Silenciaire" (1969) is Ohana's most 'informal' and avantgarde work, for six percussionists and strings. It too features many of his trademarks, but is highly unpredictable. It's one of his most severe and black-hearted pieces; there is a section near the start where the strings ascend heavenwards, freeze in a grotesque chord and are smashed by brutal percussion impacts followed by a light rain of triangles, bell-gongs etc. barely audible. Dissonant bells toll for the dead. It is pretty hard listening by all accounds. "Chiffres de Clavecin" (1968) is a set of movements for harpsichord and ensemble a million miles from J.S.Bach. It's free-metre, atonal and very violent. Yet despite the chaos this sounds like, it is a surprisingly coherent and concise piece (this re |
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