Spectrum XXI in Paris

[Andy Wilson]

A small group of faust-listees were in Paris last week ago to catch two nights of Dumitrescu & The Hyperion Ensembles' Spectrum XXI festival as it toured from Romania to Brussels to Geneva to Paris...

Attending were myself and Sophie, Alan H & Zoe, Ian L & Jim D.
We were there for two nights, Friday and Saturday the 1st and 2nd Nov. both concerts took place at the tiny Centre Wallonie-Bruxells, just opposite the Pompidou Centre.

Between us we constituted a large proportion of the audience. As someone remarked at the time - Dumitrescu et al consider it phenomenologically unhip to promote themselves. At the same time they have an aspiration to be (rightly) recognised as the most important composers of the age. This creates certain tensions.

I won't give details of the particular pieces we heard because I can't - the programme for the two nights seemed to have been jettisoned for various reasons. Here's an example of one of those reasons - the first night was supposed to feature a number of piano pieces... but no one had bothered to check that the venue owned a piano. The two nights consisted of a number of different types of performances;


1) Guest soloists got to perform their own work with the help of one another and the Hyperions. These guests included Robert Reigel (sax), Gustavo Aguilar (perc) and Tim Hodgkinson (sax, clarinette, etc). Chris Cutler was also there as a guest but, unless I missed something, didn't perform one of his own pieces.

Robert, Tim and Gustavo are all regular guests of the Hyperions. Robert's piece was well structured but in the end, maybe, too well structured, so that you heard the structre but not the music. Tim had two pieces performed, both excellent - but especially a piece he played on clarinet, processing it electronically ('Nameless Tower II'). The (improvised?) piece that Tim, Gustavo and Robert played was were fierce and spectacular, and though everyone who plays with Dumitrescu & Avram does tend to suffer by comparison, they held their own.

Incidentally - I recommend Tim's solo albums as being at the border connecting rock, free music and modern composition (Tim's site). Similarly, Gustavo's various albums are well worth your time - they vary considerably in terms of tone and personnel, but all those I've heard to date (I bought seven as a job lot from him in Paris and am still working my way through) are excellent (Discography). PS. I'd especially recommend the 'Sonu' album, which even has mutant hip-hop on it.



2) The next class of pieces was those composed by members of the Hyperion Ensemble - the only one I noticed was the first piece played on friday, by Petru Teodorescu, a young student of Dumitrescu and a percussionist in the Hyperions. His piece ('Shadow/Wave') was an engaging mix of instruments and prepared electronics, but is very much in the style of Dumitrescu & Avram without the same intensity or, as they might say, phenomenological attention to the unfolding form. On the other hand, he's developing at quite a pace (he has a CD out on Editions Modern which is splendid.)



3) Third category - members of the Hyperions solo'd on pieces by various composers. I couldn't tell you which piece was being played by which instrumentalist, but anything led by Ion Ghita (double bass player in the Hyperions) or Ioan Marius Lacraru (ditto violin) is nothing less than mind-bendingly brilliant. They both has a number of pieces and were both uniformly astounding. Lacraru has a CD of recordings on EM which is nothing short of breathtaking. The only Ghita solo pieces I know are on various Dumitrescu releases and they are always heart-stoppingly dramatic and powerful. I think these two guys are among the most convincing musicians I ever heard play. I believe that the pieces they played may have been by Xenakis and Gerard Pape, among others.



4) Solos by other guest musicians. here largely it was a matter of a number of pieces by Mirel Iancovici (a fellow Romanian) on cello. They were fine pieces, but didn't thrill me the way Ghita, Lacraru &, eg., Tim Hodgkinson did.
5) Finally: Dumitrescu & Avram pieces, using various combinations of the Hyperions and guests. Apart from 'Remote Pulsar', played on the first night, I didn't recognise any of the pieces, but they probably consisted of some combination of;


AMA: Telesma, Voices and Winds of the Desert, Zodiaque

ID: Spectrum



In general these pieces rose above the rest of the music we heard there. Not that there was anything wrong with (most of) the other music, but ID & AMA are now so totally in control of what they do, and so sure of their aesthetic, that they can reliably take you to extraordinary places as they will.
At times the sound was like the fluttering of birds wings heard from a distance. At other times it sounded like a star exploding heard close up. And everything in between was covered too. I noticed that the music seemed incredibly loud to me even though it was being played at normal volumes - you concentrate so closely on the music, and it has such a huge, unprecedented dynamic range, that it is easy to get that impression.

I also noted with interest that although I think of ID-AMAs music as tightly controlled, one of the guest musicians said afterwards that it was much more like a film set for a Western - all facade, with not so much as you'd guess holding it up. I'm prepared to accept that, and yet believe that it's the situation that ID-AMA set up that allows people to feel that they are 'out there', exposed, with not enough support - and yet the result is just what ID & AMA intended. They can do this because they know the musicians so well.


I was disappointed not to see Iancu D on the first night. it turned out that his car had been too full to take musicians and drum kit from Brussels to Paris, so he'd brought the musicians first, then set of back to Brussels to pick up the rest of the drum kit.


"...The music of Romania's leading composer Iancu Dumitrescu is spectral, electroacoustic, but above all it is a coherent totality grounded in a different conception. Of all living composers, Dumitrescu is the one who has most exploded sound. Dumitrescu's work is a negation, from the depths, of everything in contemporary music symptomatic of distraction, of banalisation, and of a radical loss of purpose. His music is not a new convolution in the knot of modern music, but an unraveling of the curse. (...) One of the first pieces I heard was "Pierres Sacrées"; I was very struck - as were many other people - by the sound of this music. It seemed quite unlike the usual sound of contemporary composed music. It had far more distortion, noise and violence. There seemed to be a shift away from stable fundamental frequencies, and a greater emphasis on the unstable aspects of sound."

Tim HODGKINSON - RESONANCE - London