Born and trained in Bucharest, Radulescu moved to Paris in 1969 and was soon a lively figure in European new-music circles—too lively to be contained within those circles. Though his concern with sound spectra (the overtone components that partly determine timbre) presaged certain aspects of spectralism, his thinking was more ranging and mystical than that of such contemporaries as Grisey. And though he shares Stockhausen’s view of sound as spiritual substance and sound-making as ritual, most of his works are instrumental and essentially abstract. His large output includes piano sonatas and string quartets as well as scores for highly unusual and, in some cases, extremely large resources. The stylistic range is similarly vast, as the two pieces included in this concert will indicate.

Agnus Dei (1991) is “a homage to the late serial-modal, sacred, Latin, Venetian Stravinsky,” and represents Radulescu at his most severe and formal. The work is based on four segments, each of which is heard three times, in the order 1-2-1-3-4-2-3-4-1-3-2-4 (the Agnus Dei of the Latin mass has the form 1-2-1-2-1-3). Moreover, each segment is composed with ladders of notes—Radulescu calls them “infinite columns,” with reference to the work of his fellow countryman Brancusi—rising in alternate minor thirds and fifths, in the case of segments 1 and 2, or alternate major seconds and fifths, in segments 3 and 4, the play with those intervals conveying something of a folk tone. Given the unwavering eighth-note pulse and the consistent dynamic level (the marking is “full resonance but NO VIBRATO”), the music has an austere fixity. The two players, bouncing off one another and the walls of their limited pitch repertories, begin a repetitive yet erratic process that continues for around nine minutes but is potentially endless.

The original performers were Gérard Caussé and Vincent Royer, who recorded the piece for their all-Radulescu album Intimate Rituals (Sub Rosa SR248).

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
In memoriam Dylan Thomas

In May 1953 Stravinsky met Dylan Thomas in Boston in order to talk about a new opera, which was to be, so he recalled, “about the rediscovery of our planet following an atomic misadventure.” (The threat was real: the United States and the Soviet Union—Stravinsky’s new country and his old—were racing to develop a hydrogen bomb.) “There would be a recreation of language,” he went on, “only the new one would have no abstractions; there would be only people, objects and words.” Six months later, however, the poet was dead, and the “recreation of language” was confined to this short memorial, where indeed there are only people (performers), objects (musical objects, all reflections of a five-note cell), and words (Thomas’s own elegy for his father).

The words are set for tenor and string quartet in a frame of “dirge-canons” for the latter in antiphony with trombones. This was Stravinsky’s first fully serial piece, his first new naming of the world of notes and intervals. In a different sense, the notes are named by Thomas’s poem. The basic five-note set, prominent in the Prelude, is associated in the song with the words “Rage, rage against,” and then carries this verbal halo into the Postlude. It was highly characteristic of Stravinsky, too, that serialism should have provided a new way of singing a very old idea, the three-note chromatically descending lament.

Given its world première at the Monday Evening Concerts in 1954, In memoriam Dylan Thomas was, a few years later, one of the pieces that opened the ears of the young Radulescu, and pointed him toward the “defective modes” (i.e. highly constrained scales) of Agnus Dei.

Horatiu Radulescu
Das Andere, Op.49

“The music we are composing is, above all, the music of a special state of the soul, and no longer a music of action.” This remark of Radulescu’s, from 1985, is especially relevant to the extraordinary Das Andere (The Other), which he had written the year before. The title denotes, he has said, with reference to the Romanian writer Mircea Eliade, “the state in certain primitive religions where you confound yourself with your God,” the neuter gender helping to signify the radical otherness of this condition. To the viola’s normal “self,” even as presented in Agnus Dei, Das Andere presents something very different—a disintegration that is also a reintegration.

Requiring precision tuning and several special techniques, the piece works with two kinds of material, designated by the Greek letters Σ and A. The Σ music consists of drones and melodies played on high harmonics of the four strings, which are tuned to fifths in just intonation (i.e. in exact frequency ratios of 3:2, not in the approximations of equal temperament). At the start, for example, the player produces the seventh harmonic on the top, or A, string (a flat G two octaves above the treble staff) and then around that adds a partly improvised melody using harmonics 8, 10, 11 and 13 on the next string down, the D string, creating an effect “like two shepherds with small flutes.” The A material “is totally the opposite: arpeggios of very low chords, in a Baroque-like style that suggest as central tone one of the open strings.” These arpeggios are made to suggest the products of ring modulation, which, from an input of two frequencies, generates an output corresponding to their sum and their difference.

There is thus a contrast between ultra-high song and gruff broken chords, but this contrast is by no means absolute. Radulescu asks that the natural harmonics of the Σ material “should always sound beautifully rough, primitive, and wild,” while the A music, despite its microtones, comes more from the instrument’s normal voice. Also, the two kinds of material interpenetrate, especially as, during the course of the piece, the Σ music gradually descends from the top two strings to the bottom two. As it does, it completes an adventure like no other.

Mr. Royer’s recording is on the album already mentioned.

Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001)
Rebonds

In a curious way, Radulescu’s life seems an echo—a harmonic, perhaps—of that of Xenakis, who also was born in Romania (in the city of Brăila, on the Danube), found a home in France (where he settled at a similar age), found links between the cybernetic present and the hieratic past, and pushed wider the boundaries of music. One way was by extending the percussion repertory. Rebonds (Rebounds), which he wrote in 1989, was his second piece for solo percussionist, distinctly different from his first, Psappha (1975), in requiring a homogeneous collection of drums and woodblocks played to a consistent pulse.

There are two sections, each around six minutes long, either of them to be performed first; Steven Schick prefers the order B – A. Rebonds B is based on two-part drumming, which is more and more disrupted by monophonic interventions. “Eventually,” Mr. Schick writes in his stimulating book The Percussionist’s Art (2006), “the increasingly frequent and potent monophonic interpolations mount an attack sufficient to atomize the original material. The piece becomes a centrifuge, flinging fragments of the opening complex into extreme associations with the now-dominant monophonic music.” In Rebonds A the process of change is triggered when an eighth-note rest is suddenly filled with sound at the movement’s fourth beat. Elaboration here is fundamentally rhythmic rather than, as in the other section, textural. Both sections demand virtuoso agility and control.

Mr. Schick’s recording of this piece is on the three-disc set of percussion music by Xenakis (Mode 171/73) he put together with colleagues.

Iannis Xenakis
Eonta

We return through a quarter-century to one of Xenakis’s classic scores, composed in 1963-4 for Pierre Boulez’s Domaine Musical concerts. There had been some antagonism between the two composers, and Xenakis may well have been determined to create something memorable. He did. He wrote the solo piano part for the formidable virtuoso Yuji Takahashi, for whom he had recently composed Herma, and again he did so with no holds barred. In the unaccompanied toccata at the start, for instance, the right hand is marked to go at six beats per second, to five in the left, sometimes with grace notes in addition and abrupt changes of dynamic level. No less demanding are the parts for the five brass players—two trumpets and three trombones—from whom extremes of agility and stamina are required, as well as quarter-tone tuning and some unusual techniques. Eonta is a twenty-minute eruption of energy.

This eruption moves through several distinct phases, some of which exemplify Xenakis’s “stochastic music,” where many tiny events combine to make a global effect (as in the opening piano solo, whose details were worked out with computer assistance), and some his “symbolic music,” so called by analogy with symbolic logic and based on manipulations of sets. The phases are marked by big changes of texture and character, and by the brass players’ movements around the stage; twice they are asked to play into the piano and so elicit sympathetic vibrations from the strings.

The Greek word eonta, Xenakis tells us, is the plural form of the present participle of the verb “to be.” He chose the term in homage to Parmenides, who taught that existence must be eternal. “As far as Eonta is concerned, the piece changes, of course, but is based on something constant.”

Thus raw sound is directed by ancient philosophy, and perhaps by something else, for Xenakis also disclosed, in the same sequence of interviews with Bálint András Varga, how the idea for the piece came to him on the lake at Tanglewood: “I was sitting in a boat in the company of a pretty girl. We were surrounded by a forest and I stroked the water with my hand. It was then that I first thought of the instruments to be used in Eonta.”

Program note © Paul Griffiths

Born in Wales, Paul Griffiths has written books on music, novels and librettos.  Among the first are The Penguin Companion to Classical Music and The Substance of Things Heard, a selection from the reviews and essays he produced during more than thirty years as a music critic in London and New York.