「Tristan Murail The Complete Piano Music」ピアニストによる解説文

「Tristan Murail The Complete Piano Music」というCDの、ピアニストであるマリリン・ノンケン(Marilyn Nonken)による解説。

ミュライユの音楽が、ラヴェルメシアンをオマージュして作られているなど、かなり重要な情報が書かれていました。

 

例えば、ミュライユの「Cloches d'adieu et un sourire...」は、メシアンの「Cloches d'angoisse et larmes d'adieu」をオマージュして作られています。

また、ミュライユの「Mandragore」は、ラヴェルの「絞首台」をオマージュして作られています。

さらに、「Comme un oeil suspendu et poli par le songe...」は、ミュライユが学生時代にメシアンの作曲クラスのオーディションに応募した作品であり、タイトルは父親であるジェラール・ミュライユ(Gérard Murail)の詩から採られたとのこと。

 

私はこれら解説文の英文をメモ帳に打ち込み、それをGoogle翻訳にかけて読みましたが、やって良かったと思います。

元のCDはこちら↓

Amazon | Murail: Complete Piano Music | Nonken | 室内楽・器楽曲 | 音楽

 

 

(以下、CD解説文の引用)

 

The piano is considered by some as an anachronism:
an instrument that remains almost exactly as it was in the nineteenth century, and which is still associated with the music of that era.
Yet the piano works of Tristan Murail show how the instrument can be revitalized and heard anew.
There is no question that his music belongs to the French tradition of Debussy, Ravel, and Messiaen.
In a radical sense, however his compositions chart an exploratory course, one that has led Murail away from traditional ideas have evolved, his ability to manipulate the piano's resonance has reached an unprecedented level of sophistication.
More than merely for the piano, Murail's works are about the piano.

Murail's musical vision transcends traditional notation.
His sense of musical time is not based on a tangible pulse or standard musical durations.
Rather, time's passing is measured in terms of how long things last:
how many seconds it takes to build a sonority, or how long it takes for that sonority to fade.
Intensity, too, is less about absolute dynamic than relative presence:
some figures are to be played just above the resonance, or just below it, or at a "quasi"-dynamic determined in context.
Thus, Murail has developed a highly personal notation, an idiosyncratic musical script mixing standard and graphic elements.
Although extremely specific, it leaves the player free to respond to the characteristics and tendencies of the instrument at hand.
His notation encourages sensitivity.
At the same time, despite the inherently volatile and fragile acoustic environment, it demands spontaneity.

Playing Murail's music is an unusually exhibitionistic experience.
Its tireless focus on the sound itself (how it is made, how it is sustained) renders the pianist uniquely exposed, as if captured by the lens of Lars Von Trier, or the pen of Michel Houellebecq.
His music reveals the ephemeral intercourse between the player and the instrumenet.
To me, there is an intimacy to these works that invites the audience, not only to listen but to become involved in the drama taking place.
While a great deal of "musical expression" is about finesse and disguise, Murail's music gains its power for what it reveals, without metaphor or pretension:
the mechanics of the instrument, the capacity of performer, and what, in all its flawed beauty, is performance in real time.

Comme un oeil suspendu et poli par le songe...was the audition piece Murail wrote to gain entry into the composition class of Olivier Messiaen.
Its title ("Like an eye, suspended, and polished by a dream...")is taken from a poem written by the composer's father.
In this ambitious student piece, with its lush harmonies, quirky rhythms, and sectional, cyclic structure, Messiaen's influence is unmistakable.
Yet Comme un oeil... is distinguished by its canny exploration of the piano's resonance, carafully manipulated through the use of extreme registers, strictly controlled dynamics, and unusual pedalings.
Already, Murail had begun to define a distinctive sound world.


If Comme un oeil... is a work of aspiration, Estuaireis one of contradiction.
More graphic in nature than its predecessor, its score reflects Murail's growing dissatisfaction with detailed makings for pedalings, attacks, dynamics, articulations, and resonances.
In terms of conception, however, it may be Murail's most traditional work.
While it does not follow a literary narrative narrative or program, its two movements - Pres des rives ("On the banks") and Au melange des eaux ("On the mixing of the waters") - are filled with poetic references to crashing waves, the undertow, the breaking surf, even the call of a foghorn.
Murail's writing for piano has been profoundly influenced by Liszt, and Esturaire may be his most Romantic composition.
Of his works for the instrument, it is the only one that seeks to evoke in such a visual, almost cinematographic way, and the only one whose score is filled with text and imagery.
As in his Couleurs de mer ("Colors of the sea"), written during the same period, the emphasis is not on form or process, but nuance and shading.

Inspired largely by the computer's work in electronic music, Territoires de l'Oubli ("Lands of the unknown") is without peer in the twentieth-century repetoire.
Perhaps in no other work can one hear the piano so transformed and its potential mined to such fantastic ends.
With an aggressive, near-obsessive focus.
Territoires unleashes not so much clouds as waves of sound.
These sonorities are immediately caught in the damper pedal, which Murail uses, by keeping it depressed throughout the work, to create a continually evolving fantasia of resonance.
In terms of acoustic phenomena, the "unknown territories" explores are landscape of pianistic impossibility and auditory illusion:
notes heard but never played (sympathietic vibrations), microtones (resulting from the interaction of the harmonics), and sonorities that emerge seemingly without attack or decay.
Depending on the nature of the material, the work's notation varies wildly.
Some pages of the score are highly specific, measuring time to the fraction of the second.
Other passages involve chance, including a cadenza in which the player must choose to repeat or omit certain materials, and a long passage in which the activities of the hands are not coordinated.

Cloches d'adieu et un sourire... ("Bells of farewell and a smile...") and La mandragore ("The mandrake") are tributes to Messiaen and Ravel, respectively.
Cloches d'adieu pays homage to Murail's teacher, and its final cadence quotes Messiaen's prelude Cloches d'angoisse et larmes d'adieu ("Bells of anguish and tears of farewell").
Legend maintains that the mandrake, a plant thought to have magical powers, grows in the shadow of the gallows.
La Mandragore regers overtly to Ravel's Le gibet ("The gallows") from Gaspard de la nuit, and, although it does not literally quote Ravel, it shares with Le gibet decisive elements of form, harmony, and ambience.
Written within a few years of each other, these two works share a certain elegance and restraint.
They are sparing in their use of figuration and ornament and almost frugal in their placement of single notes, chords, and passagework.
As Territoires de l'Oubli literally brutalizes the instrument (it is not unusual for strings to break during performance), La Mandragore and Cloches d'adieu are less physical, more cerebral and spiritual studies of sonority.

Les Travaux et les Jours ("Works and days"), whose title is taken from Hesiod, mirrors Territoires de l'Oubli in its expansiveness.
A series of nine interconnected, unnamed miniatures, Les Travaux et les Jors places new emphasis on from and development.
Each movement has its own shape and direction.
However, distinctive motivic fragments recur and are developed throughout, creating a sence of continuty, perhaps narrative.
The eighth movement retraces all that has happened thus far, offering a retrospective of perviously heard fragments against a transformed harmonic backdrop.
While this work features some of Murail's most contemplative writing (particulary the third and ninth movements), it is also unabashedly extroverted and confidant in its use of virtuosity:
brilliant passagework, grace-note figures, and arepeggiations.
At the final cadence, which comes to rest on an undulating B-C ninth, Les Travaux et les Jours nods to Territoires de l'Oubli;
this same distinctive interval, which begins and ends Territoires, plays a conspicuous role in both compositions.
Murail has spoken of Les Travaux as possessing a sense of resolution lacking from its predecessor;
yet, in many ways, the more recent may be the more enigmatic work.
I commissioned Les Travaux et les Jours from Murail with funds from the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University.

@2005 Marilyn Nonken