With their contemplations of the Swiss countryside, the poems of Gustave Roud clearly struck a chord with Jürg Frey, whose equally contemplative music, in which silence is just as important as pitched notes, often embarks on long, slow walks through musical landscapes in which familiar objects take on wholly new identities. Frey’s language is clearly rooted in that of the American experimentalists of the 50s and 60s, especially Morton Feldman, but in these pieces inspired by Roud’s work, that conceptual world is given much more specificity, even if it remains as refined and remote as ever.
Of the five works in the collection, the longest, Farblose Wolken, Glück, Wind, is a setting of a text by Roud, delivered by a soprano (Regula Konrad) in long, isolated syllables, and punctuated by equally etiolated contributions from trumpet, cello and percussion. The others are purely instrumental works. Three are trios for various combinations of clarinet, violin, cello and piano, while La Présence, les Silences is for solo piano (Dante Boon), a slow-moving, 40-minute frieze of gentle resonances, repeated notes and the ghosts of harmonic progressions. It’s certainly not music for the impatient.
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