Three orchestral works composed in successive decades, all of them recorded for the very first time in wonderfully diligent performances under Pierre-André Valade, provide a good introduction to Tristan Murail’s sound world.
The work of this onetime pupil of Olivier Messiaen, born in 1947, who along with Gérard Grisey and Hugues Dufourt became closely associated with the so-called spectral movement in French music in the 70s and 80s, has become more linear, more obviously French, over the years. It seems less concerned with microtonal shifts and harmonies now, though such ideas still play an important role in some of Murail’s pieces – the most recent score here, Contes Cruels, from 2007, centres on a pair of electric guitars tuned a quarter of a tone apart, the sound of both being constantly transformed through electronic modulation.
But there are moments in Le Partage des Eaux, completed in 1996 and the first in a series of works exploring the complexity of natural sounds, in which the stylistic wheel seems to turn full circle, with wind writing that harks back directly to Messiaen. Such gestures seem far from the more tangled, shifting surfaces of his 1985 composition, Sillages, inspired by the rock gardens of Kyoto, though the sonorities are equally luminous, and striking.
