New Music Orchestra / Zubel / The Ultimate Liberation - NOSPR

Mussorgsky’s Pesni i plyaski smerti (Songs and Dances of Death), Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), and Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs) may not belong among the most popular works in the canon, yet they are unquestionably indispensable to it. That fact owes much to the gravity of their subject matter, their musical expression, and in many cases the personal histories that shaped them. Likewise, Gérard Grisey’s Four Songs for Crossing the Threshold were created in the year of the composer’s death – an event no rational foresight could have foretold. While these songs rarely appear in subscription programmes, three decades after they were created it is safe to say that they have entered the canon, performed regularly by leading ensembles of new music and by distinguished singers, among them Barbara Hannigan and Agata Zubel.

Was it really just coincidence that, at the very end of his life, a distinguished heir to the French avant-garde should take up the most fundamental theme of culture (and not only the Western one at that) and draw upon the classical texts of the Sumerians, the great civilisations of the Mediterranean basin (Egyptian, Greek), and the reflections of post-Enlightenment thinkers, while using archetypal musical gestures that are comprehensible not only to experts but to all? Long gripped by an obsession with the continuity and materiality of sound, the composer now contemplates what cannot be seen, what lies beyond the threshold of scientific knowledge. He then brings the cycle to its conclusion with a lullaby which ‘ is not intended to lull us to sleep, but rather to open our eyes to the dying of humanity, ultimately liberated from the nightmare.…’.

Michał Mendyk

Concert duration: approximately 60 minutes