Claude Vivier: Orion revival and Ruhr music theatre
(January 2010)
Renewed interest in the music of Claude Vivier (1943-1983) continues apace, moving from specialist circles to mainstream programming, as witnessed by the increasing popularity of Orion. This cosmic orchestral work was written for the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and premiered thirty years ago under Charles Dutoit, who returned to the work again last year at the BBC Proms in his new guise as Principal Conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Orion was also programmed by the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin in December, and Ingo Metzmacher conducts performances by the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester in Berlin in May and June.The Times reviewing the Proms performance described how “the Canadian Vivier wrote music that’s still winning friends with its colourful, complex textures and abundant melodic life… [Orion is] an impressive score of interruptions and luminous twinklings.” and the Sunday Telegraph wrote of Orion's "cosmic soundscapes, turbulent at first but increasingly meditative…"
In its compact 13-minute span Orion provides an ideal introduction to the composer’s soundworld and is a piece which can fit readily into standard orchestral programmes and rehearsal schedules. It surveys a wide range of expressive territory and traces a journey paralleling the composer’s own to the East, or perhaps to the universe beyond the constellation - Vivier’s programme note ends with a call to exploration:
“Go and find out for yourself!”
Last year’s Ruhrtriennale included a new theatre production built from Vivier’s works entitled Sing für mich, Tod (Sing for me, Death). Dramatist Albert Ostermaier created a monologue based on Vivier’s creative journey, and director David Hermann combined this text with Vivier’s own music to explore the composer’s life, work and tragic death. Performances in the abandoned machine hall of the former Zweckel colliery in Gladbeck, near Essen featured musikFabrik conducted by Christoph Poppen.
“Vivier is a stranger in the vast dimensions of this world, only finding home, shelter, tenure, identity in his music… The most lasting impression was left by two vocal compositions, dramatically integrated into the programme in convincing fashion by Hermann: Lonely Child (with the ‘voix humaine’ of a despairing telephoning woman) and the Hölderlin setting Wo bist du Licht!... Yet Vivier always controls through an extremely heterophonic, at the same time ‘dirty’ music, its language using stimuli from the western avant-garde via Far Eastern influences to electro-acoustic methods and — moving between aleatoric composition and ‘new simplicity’ — still finds its own, individual sound.”
Opernwelt
“Vivier’s musical building blocks constantly move between tonality and atonality, sensual pathos and compressed concentrations of chords in the four chosen works dating from 1980 to 1983… The output, created in just a decade, was an extraordinary balancing act between different worlds. Nevertheless he mastered it with an individuality which allows the future to resonate with the past.”
Frankfurter Rundschau
> Further information on Work: Orion
Photo: the Ruhrtriennale production of Sing für mich, Tod. Credit: Paul Leclaire.
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