In many respects Rotaru is the odd one out on this program, as a woman and an eastern European, being also a little younger than the others (who were born within three and a half weeks of one another) and far slower to make an international reputation. Where Murail and Sciarrino were both well established by their late twenties, she was virtually unknown outside her native Romania until she was into her forties, and her presence remains alluringly obscure, recordings of her music being hard to find.

One thing, however, is clear: her attachment to wind instruments and especially to the flute. In an output that includes remarkably few vocal works, the flute seems to take the place of the voice—an abstract voice, perhaps, or a voice from which the noise of language has been sanded away by time, since the flute for her is also an instrument that can join with antiquity, one that has changed very little in its essence through thousands of years.

“I have always had a special feeling for the flute,” she has said, “the magic instrument, omnipresent in all traditional cultures and heavily charged with a lot of significations. Emotionally, I am very fond of its sound—so warm, so pure, so refined, so beautiful—thus, the most indicated (at least in my opinion) for prayer or meditation.” Besides many solo and chamber pieces, her output includes works for whole orchestras of twenty-four flutes and also four flute concertos, with a fifth being written now for this evening’s soloist.

Composed in 1997 and playing for ten minutes or so, Tempio di fumo (Temple of Smoke) is an incantation, taking its place in a history of incantations for solo flute going back almost a century to Debussy’s Syrinx, which is explicitly recalled here, but also far further. What sound like new techniques, such as singing into the instrument to produce chords, sound also like musical archaeology, digging back into the flute’s deep past. References to panpipes and Byzantine chant are marked in the score. Modal figures, encountered and re-encountered as the long line loops on, come as resonances from long ago but revitalized. Up to the point where the line vanishes in magical harmonics, something is restoring itself from prehistory.

TRISTAN MURAIL (b. 1947)
Territoires de l’oubli

The “territories of oblivion” in this majestic piece are the spaces—spaces within the piano, within the hall in which it is played, and within our ears—where the instrument’s sound resonates, fades, and disappears. Murail has said he wrote the composition “for the resonances, not the attacks which are considered as ‘scars’ on the continuum.” The notes on the page are only a means to conjure the mass of reverberant sound of which the piece is made, and which the performer has to sustain and reshape, achieving growth with sounds in process of decay. For those of us who listen, echoes, which we normally take to be traces of past events, become the living present.

As Marilyn Nonken has outlined in an essay for the journal Tempo, in reconceiving the piano, Murail both constrains and enlarges the role of the performer. Since traditional notation is no longer fully adequate, he adapts it in original ways and adds new signs and instructions. On the other hand, he often allows some freedom in how gestures are made—in their rhythmic projection, for instance, or their force, which the player will have to gauge in relation to the continuing reverberation. Of one passage, Nonken advises that “the pianist must develop a gestural vocabulary to conform with Murail’s verbal description and visual cues, approaching a choreography that provides an aural match for the notation.”

From this collaboration come the extraordinary effects Nonken describes: “Notes never struck emerge from the texture, resulting not from attacks but sympathetic vibrations. Pitches that exceed the piano’s tessitura hover, canopy-like, over the resonance: phantom pitches produced through the interaction of harmonics.” These harmonics, being in simple frequency ratios with their fundamentals, will also be in delicate conflict with the piano’s equal temperament, so that a harmonic and a struck note may produce beats and make the sound shimmer or vibrate.

Murail wrote the piece in 1977, at a time when he and his friends were in the early stages of developing spectral music, generally using mixed instrumental ensembles to create an interplay between the notes of a harmony and the partials of a timbre in processes of continuous evolution. Territoires de l’oubli proved that such music could be achieved, too, with the resonating strings and frame of a piano.

SALVATORE SCIARRINO (b. 1947)
La perfezione di uno spirito sottile

The composer has devoted several texts—practical, fantastical or, more often and characteristically, a mixture of the two—to this extraordinary piece he wrote in 1985. His introduction to the score begins as follows:

“This work came about as a musical ritual, to be performed outside, in the neighbourhood of overhangs, cliffs, strange rock formations, or on endless plains—but also indoors, against a simple white wall.

“A geological chaos for scenery or the horizon, a line in the mind.

“The gods have died, and we no longer believe in magic. Yet we still recognize a certain mysterious solitude. Led by the wind, we can find something that links all these places, however diverse. A secret sign, one ideal for the theater: space manifesting itself in a pure state. And the visitor discovers a condition that is primary, contradictory, frightening. The loss of human dimensions.”

“The shape of this work came from the request made initially to the author, for music to be associated with the flight of kites. Such a destination was conducive to thoughts of a non-optimistic nature concerning the natural environment and our human vocation to self-destruction. There came the idea of filling the air with the sound of small bells. It became clear that to launch ringing kites would evoke fantastical oriental conjurations, made not only to propitiate ancient spirits but also against fire storms. Thus the project defined itself as a funeral ritual, as a lament echoing over desert plains. But it was truly only a small step from these kites to Chernobyl, and the tragic event of the following year opened the eyes of many to the real menace of a fire storm.

“Therefore a threnody. Its length may appear barely in proportion to its team of only two performers. In this respect, however, help comes from the instrumental richness and from a formal articulation in which time is treated as a varying and discontinuous dimension. For the flute can project a universe of sounds embedded in references to the voice.

“The sung text was found on Crete, engraved on gold plates. In antiquity these were to serve as a reminder of the dialogue between the soul and the guardian of the springs. These words of passion and wisdom—moreover, partly set to music by Nono—provide a topical lesson: to choose memory, and not oblivion, is the necessary way for the survival of culture and of human life.

“La perfezione di uno spirito sottile carries a dedication to Luigi Nono.”

I burn with thirst and die
Drink from the eternal spring to the right of the cypress
Who are you? And where do you come from?
I am the son of the earth and of the starry sky

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.