Georges Lentz - Music

Music

The Vale of Glamorgan Festival (UK), where Lentz was a featured composer in 2006, introduced his music as "...an awestruck and almost fearful response to the beauties and mysteries of the universe; a massive, personal creative undertaking from which this intense, almost obsessive composer is painstakingly extracting concert works...a unique voice whose music is genuinely moving despite its brittle austerity and unearthliness, and captures some of the most evocative silences imaginable."

Georges Lentz’s music is highly original, while showing the influence of the French Spectralists and, to some degree, the New Complexity movement (unusual instrumental combinations, extended playing techniques etc.). It is often soft, fluctuates between polyphonic intricacy and fragile monody and sometimes contains extended silences. In its searing intensity and its often psychedelic colours, it has an almost 'visionary' slant to it.

Lentz’s scores of recent years (Mysterium) are written in an unusual rhythmic system, where each bar contains four beats, but the beats can be of different lengths. While it is not clear why Lentz has adopted this idiosyncratic system, the sophisticated textures and colours (occasionally with delicate layers of computer-generated sounds) superimposed over the top of these rigid “grids” render the music far from monotonous or square and frequently give it an extraordinary shimmering or 'twinkling' quality.

Another feature particularly of his recent orchestral works is a refined and instantly recognizable sense of harmony incorporating both microtonality and, now and then, an austere sense of 'twisted' tonality, with the occasional harmonic progression fleetingly reminiscent of Schumann or Bruckner. However, these chorale-like fragments are always brief and buried in the texture of the music, giving the impression of something “long forgotten”.

Georges Lentz has said that in recent years he has been increasingly interested in, and influenced by, the practices of musical improvisation, music technology and sound art.

His latest work, Ingwe, is a monumental 60-minute work for solo electric guitar, possibly the longest solo composition ever written for the instrument. It contrasts sharply, in many ways, with Lentz's prior music and takes the electric guitar into dimensions previously unexplored in a 'classical' context. Ingwe also contains, for the first time in Lentz's output, a short section that relinquishes strict control over the material and gives improvisational freedom to the performer.

The composer's website states that he is currently working on a 'kind of string quartet', though what exactly he means by this is as yet unclear.

Because of its vast cyclical structure, Lentz's work has been described by British musicologist Chris Dench as "almost proustian" in nature. For the same reasons it has occasionally been compared to Balzac's literary cycle La Comédie Humaine. There seems however to be little relation between Lentz's music and these writers apart from the obvious structural parallels and perhaps a certain panoramic view of the world.

In the final analysis, Lentz’s music seems to be torn between intense feelings of awe and an overriding struggle with spiritual doubt and existential loneliness.