Henri Dutilleux - Music

Music

Dutilleux numbered as Op. 1 his Piano Sonata (1946–1948), written for pianist Geneviève Joy, whom he had married in 1946. He has renounced most of the works he composed before it because he did not believe them to be representative of his mature standards, considering many of them to be too derivative to have merit.

After the Piano Sonata, Dutilleux started working on his First Symphony (1951). It consists of four monothematic movements and has a perfectly symmetrical structure: music slowly emerges from silence (1st movement— a passacaglia) and builds towards a fast climax (2nd—a scherzo and moto perpetuo), keeps its momentum (3rd—"a continuous melodic line that never goes back on itself"), and finally slowly fades out (4th—a theme and variations).

In 1953, Dutilleux wrote the music for the ballet Le loup.

In his Second Symphony, titled Le double (1959), the orchestra is divided into two groups: a small one at the front with instruments taken from the various sections (brass, woodwind, strings and percussion) and a bigger one at the back consisting of the rest of the orchestra. Although this brings to mind the Baroque concerto grosso, the approach is different: in this piece, the smaller ensemble acts as a mirror or ghost of the bigger one, sometimes playing similar or complementary lines, sometimes contrasting ones.

His next work, Métaboles (for orchestra, 1965) explores the idea of metamorphosis, how a series of subtle and gradual changes can radically transform a structure. A different section of the orchestra dominates each of the first four movements before the fifth brings them all together for the finale. As a result, it can be considered as a concerto for orchestra. It quickly achieved celebrity and, following its première by George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, was performed in several North American cities, then in France. Métaboles is now one of his most often performed works.

In the mid-sixties, Dutilleux met Mstislav Rostropovich, who commissioned him to write a cello concerto. Rostropovich premièred the work, titled Tout un monde lointain, in 1970. It is one of the most important additions to the cello repertoire of the second half of the 20th century and is considered one of the composer's major achievements. In five movements, Tout un monde lointain is a nocturnal, mysterious work with a delicate orchestration and an eerily beautiful, yet highly virtuosic solo part. While most of the concerto is introspective and meditative, it also has occasional outbursts of violence and a frantic build-up to the ambiguous, suspended finale.

After the cello concerto, Dutilleux turned to chamber music for the first time in more than 20 years and published various works for piano (3 Préludes, Figures de résonances) and 3 strophes sur le nom de Sacher (1976–1982) for solo cello. The latter work was originally composed on the occasion of Paul Sacher's 70th birthday in 1976, on a request by Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich to write compositions for cello solo using his name spelt out in musical notes as the theme eS-A-C-H-E-Re (Es is E-flat in German, H is B-natural in German, and Re is D in French; see Sacher hexachord). He also wrote the string quartet Ainsi la Nuit (1976). It consists of seven movements, some of which are linked by short "parentheses". The function of these parentheses is to recall material that has already been heard and to introduce fragments that will be fully developed later. Each movement highlights various special effects (pizzicato, glissandi, harmonics, extreme registers, contrasting dynamics…) resulting in a difficult but fascinating work.

He then returned to orchestral works in 1978 with Timbres, espace, mouvement ou la nuit etoilée, inspired by Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night. In this composition, Dutilleux attempted to translate into musical terms the opposition between emptiness and movement conveyed by the painting. The work employs a string section of only lower-register instruments: cellos and double basses, no violins or violas.

In 1985, Isaac Stern premiered L'arbre des songes, a violin concerto that he had commissioned Dutilleux to write. Like its cello counterpart, it is an important addition to the instrument's 20th century repertoire. However, it is completely atonal, more in the mold of Arnold Schoenberg or Alban Berg, than of Ravel, Debussy or Roussel.

Dutilleux later wrote Mystère de l'instant (for cymbalum, string orchestra and percussion, 1989), Les Citations (for oboe, harpsichord, double bass and percussion, 1991), The Shadows of Time (for orchestra and children voices, 1997), Slava's Fanfare (for Rostropovich's 70th birthday, 1997) and Sur le même accord (for violin and orchestra, 2002 - dedicated to Anne-Sophie Mutter).

In 2003, he completed Correspondances, a song-cycle for soprano and orchestra inspired by poems and letters by Prithwindra Mukherjee, Rainer Maria Rilke, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vincent van Gogh. This work has received a very enthusiastic reception and has been programmed several times since its première.

His latest work is another song-cycle entitled Le temps l'horloge, written for American soprano Renée Fleming. It consists of four pieces and an instrumental interlude on two poems by Jean Tardieu, one by Robert Desnos and one by Charles Baudelaire. The first three songs were premièred at the Saito Kinen Festival Matsumoto, Japan in September 2007. The American première of this partial version took place in November 2007 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The complete work was unveiled on May 7, 2009 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris where the 16-minutes song-cycle was immediately encored.

Most recently, Dutilleux has added a third movement to his chamber work Les Citations. The expanded version was premiered at the Festival d’Auvers-sur-Oise on 24 June 2010. In 2011, Pascal Gallois transcribed, with Dutilleux's approval, his Deux sonnets de Jean Cassou for bassoon and piano (originally for baritone and piano).

As for future projects, Dutilleux has expressed the wish to write more chamber music, notably a second string quartet, a genre he feels he has neglected.