The Xenakis Centenary Celebrated With Fanfare (and Percussion!) At The Philharmonie De Paris)

He would be 100 (or possibly 101) next May 29. Iannis Xenakis, one of the most spectacular composers of the 1950s and 1970s which saw the triumph of so-called serial music, inaugurates a series of centenarians who will see his successor Ligeti (2023), Berio and Boulez (2025), Henze (2026) , Stockhaüsen (2028) We forget some. The Greek-born composer was the subject of a weekend at the Philharmonie de Paris as well as an exhibition that runs until June.

A personality that still concerns us

A rich weekend, piano, choir, orchestra, chamber music, percussion, for an equally multifaceted composer, curious about so many experiments, confronted during these days with more or less close colleagues (Debussy, Poulenc, Stravinsky or Pärt) The opportunity, first of all, because Xenakis was so linked, by his strong personality, to the bubbling of the 60s and 70s, to verify that this personality still concerned us, still spoke, beyond the scandals or the political dimension, to our musical sensibility. We say it straight away: the answer is yes.

“Nights”, against all dictatorships

Yes, on this Sunday, and simply through listening to three chamber music works (for strings and for percussion) and one for large orchestra, spatialized as was often done at the time, that is- that is, divided into groups distributed in space. We couldn’t have done better, we regret it. We don’t remember, for example, having listened a lot to the piano music of the master, but we obviously remember having heard in those years that marvel that is Nights (not repeated this weekend), an immense cry of suffering and revolt which evoked, as much as the war camps, the torture dungeons of distant or very close dictatorships – it was, in the country of Xenakis, the ubiquitous power and cruel of the colonels and Nights echoed it, like Zthe film by compatriot Costa-Gavras with music by Theodorakis (another kind of music)

Architect before being a musician

But today we are in naked music, if not this itinerary of which Xenakis was the emblematic representative, which united music and science so strongly with composers who had a real mathematical training (Boulez for example) and Xenakis was of those. Plus, rare in the musical world, he will first exercise a completely different profession, and at what level! Architect in the cabinet of Le Corbusier, and signing (we see it in the exhibition) a pavilion at the Brussels Universal Exhibition of 1958 – that of the Atomium!

Resistant before, and during the Second World War where he was injured by shrapnel, losing his left eye and “earning” sad scars there, and during the civil war in his Greek nation, communist at heart and this title defeated, which will force him into exile.

Mediterranean and so curious

The hobby, it was the composition, and it is it which will carry it. He sometimes remarked that the loss of his eye, having reduced (m)my senses by half, it is as if I had to apprehend the exterior through a hole. So I was forced to think more than to feel. Hence, according to him, his propensity for abstraction, which we find in his large score drawings which are more like sketches of imaginary pyramids, of an unknown geometric world to which Xenakis almost alone had the keys.

Nevertheless: what we heard almost contradicted his words: abstract but sensitive, cerebral but extroverted, vertical but cosmological, and frenetically linear. Reflection no doubt of a Mediterranean character, in any case exacerbated, and more deeply curious. Sounds, rhythms, timbres, and (as much as possible) above all never done.

Musicians transformed into rugby players

Very well explained by John Stulz, violist (American) of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, who played Grouse for string quartet with violinists Jeanne-Marie Conquer and Diego Tosi and cellist Renaud Déjardin. It had started funny with the Thai meditation by Massenet nobly played by Diego Tosi then taken over by him “in the manner of Xenakis”. Massenet would not have recovered from it but we did, with a hearty laugh. All Xenakis was there: we scratch, we hit, we squeak, we pinch. physical exercise, Stulz tells us, where, in the end, you feel more like rugby players than musicians.

But, in these war sirens and charming sirens, these glissandos, this aggressiveness of sound, there is always meaning. It sometimes feels like a great outburst where you face the world, which you imagine (which Xenakis imagined) will be full of promise and noisy. With truly musical attention (and we know that the string quartet is an ungrateful form in ungrateful hands) to listening to the voices, to their enhancement, to the instrumental blend even in the violence, because it is , says Stulz, to build another beauty.

The choices of a cellist

This beauty and this power of the instrumentation, we had already tried them with Kottos, demanding piece of about ten minutes, in another room of the beautiful Museum of Music. In the form of a first meeting (before Grouse) with Canadian cellist Emilie Girard-Charest: Kottos, in mythology, is a monster with 100 heads and performing this piece is a lesson in humility. Work on the note to get everything possible out of it. The rumbles on the string, the doubling on the treble, the bare-hand whistles, the knocks on the thigh. Like an emergency. With an influence, sometimes, of Bartok (Xenakis, like Bartok, born in present-day Romania) And, Girard-Charest tells us, an excellent teacher as well as a courageous interpreter, we always have choices to make. We cannot perform this piece as it is written. It is also in this that it is fascinating.

Xenakis, crazy about percussion

On the third floor of the museum we find the Trio… Xenakis: three dazzling young percussionists who thus pay homage to a composer who did so much (with the Percussions de Strasbourg in particular) to place their repertoire in the solo and chamber music fields. Bounces A and Bounces Bincredible rhythmic… and mathematical studies, for various forms of drums (and wooden boxes, these small hollow boxes which resonate like a wooden xylophone, of various possible colors, these are a beautiful raspberry red which takes the light)

B Bounces is the most spectacular, wonderfully defended by an unleashed Emmanuel Jacquet, of intense virtuosity; Bounces A is more “musical”, thus played with less energy and speed, more “in breathing”, by Rodolphe Théry; and they are joined by Adélaïde Ferrière for okko, played on the djembes (the little African drum), which they have, if we understand correctly, chosen to split. Everyone, from memory, has three in front of them, so that the power of the sounds (the rhythmic complexity is always the same) is reinforced.

The Great Orchestra Experience… Divided

In the great hall of the Philharmonie the orchestra awaits us Centuries and its leader, François-Xavier Roth, who come out of their “comfort zone”, playing Alex, of 1985. This means By exchanges and this is the case for the three sets of instruments placed on the stage at each vertex of a triangle, to do a job, Xenakis tells us, on the transformations of plans, disorders, orders, sounds, structures (in time and out of time) Good. That was the way it was at the time, and the mathematician Xenakis was speaking that way. Let us say that it is a very beautiful piece written for flutes, clarinets, horns by 2, trombone, harps, violins, cellos by 2, percussion. A study of pitches, durations, spatial identities and the identities over time, which can cause symmetries as complex as desired…

However, the strength ofAlax is to never forget that music is sonic enjoyment, carried by musicians who do not forget it either (we should have been alerted by this yellow cello with clouds): the brass instruments make a rumbling sea entrance then the harps speak almost in an oriental mode. A long, slow, plaintive march follows, with the brass supported by the strings, like a sort of Greek procession of the punishing gods. before an acceleration carried by the percussions which ends in an incredible climax. Mathematics did not prevail over sensuality.

Masterpieces by Stravinsky, Metamorphoses by Xenakis

After that, Stravinsky seems very classical. However, we will have heard with immense pleasure his violin concerto, carried by one of the greatest artists of this time, the too discreet Isabelle Faust, with a simplicity, a humor, which are the essence of this concerto created in 1931 where Stravinsky begins to take his classical turn (influence of Bach ) And finally the 1945 version of theBird of Fire where Roth insists a little too much on the sound beauty and on the inventiveness of the orchestration, to the detriment of what makes it a “barbaric” work, which announces, much more than Petrushka, The Rite of Spring –at times you think you’re at Ravel’s. But it’s very refined, and the Kastchei dance is still in mind.

We had previously taken a tour of the exhibition at the Music Museum. Not huge but illuminating with its sonic experiences (The legend of Eer, electronic composition for images and sounds written for the inauguration of the Center Pompidou), his scores which resemble immense algorithmic problems, the famous Brussels pavilion and various architectural creations; and the memories of Yannis’ happy childhood, on sunny islands, in carefree times.

The intelligence, culture, courage and genius of a man.

Intimate Xenakis: series of concerts given at the Museum of Music: Kottos for solo cello by Emilie Girard-Charest; Grouse for string quartet by soloists from the Ensemble intercontemporain; Rebounds B, Rebounds A, Okho for percussion by Trio Xenakis.

Orchestra concert Centuries conducted by François-Xavier Roth: Xenakis (Alex) Stravinsky (Violin Concerto with Isabelle Faust; The Firebird, sequel to 1945)

Philharmonie de Paris 1 and 2 (Music Museum) on March 20.

Exposure Xenakis Revolutions at the Music Museum until June 26 (closed on Mondays and May 1)