The French composer Henri Dutilleux died in 2013, aged 97, not so far short of the centenary being celebrated this year. This Wigmore programme featured three of his works, either for solo instrument or string quartet, setting them in the context of two of his major French predecessors.
Cellist Gautier Capuçon began with an eloquent account of the Three Strophes on the Name Sacher, commissioned by Mstislav Rostropovich in 1976 to celebrate the achievements of that musical super-patron, Paul Sacher, by translating his surname into musical notation.
Pianist Frank Braley followed with an equally striking interpretation of Dutilleux’s Three Preludes, written over a period of 15 years and eventually published in 1988. Their relationship to Debussy’s works in the genre is obvious, though Dutilleux’s harmony and textures are far denser and his technical demands much greater; Braley nevertheless brought to them an easy sense of command combined with absolute expressive conviction.
Dutilleux’s sole string quartet, Ainsi La Nuit – surely one of his works most likely to survive – brought the programme to a close. Premiered in 1977, this intense and unsettling 20-minute nocturnal has established itself as a classic of the medium, its seven movements exploring an exceptional variety of instrumental colour and texture, often drawing on special effects to do so. This performance by Capuçon – together with violinists Lisa Batiashvili and Valeriy Sokolov plus viola player Gérard Caussé – showed total mastery of its tight structure and dynamic range.
Earlier, Batiashvili, Capuçon and Braley came together for a performance of Ravel’s Piano Trio that demonstrated its vibrant passion and surprising grandeur. In a reminder of another of Dutilleux’s predecessors, Batiashvili and Braley also delivered a reading of Debussy’s late Violin Sonata that maintained a constant sense of improvisation while emphasising its extraversion and brilliance.
