New Vivier DVD, Reves d'un Marco Polo: travels of a spiritual explorer(March 2006) Admirers of the visionary Canadian composer Claude Vivier (1948-83) tend to be a cultish lot. Having fallen under the spell of Vivier’s music, they have had to share their enthusiasm by word of mouth – or bootleg copies – since many of his recordings are out of print.
Relief is now at hand, in the form of an extraordinary new 2-DVD set on the Opus Arte label: Rêves d’un Marco Polo: The Life and Work of Claude Vivier (OA 0943) Reinbert de Leeuw, a leading interpreter of Vivier’s music, conducts the Schoenberg Ensemble and the Asko Ensemble. The cast is headed by soprano Susan Narucki, another Vivier champion, with Claron McFadden, Kathryn Harries, and others. Vivier, whose music was decisively affected by his travels to the Far East, deeply identified with the figure of Marco Polo, extending the metaphor of a voyage of discovery into the spiritual realm. “One of Vivier's grandest plans – left unrealized by his murder at age 34 in 1983 – was to collect a number of independent works on the theme of Marco Polo and present them as a kind of opera,” writes Alan Artner in the Chicago Tribune. "As [de Leeuw] says on an accompanying hourlong documentary, here are tonal works of vision and power with a sound unlike that of any other Western contemporary. Four of them appeared on a 1996 Philips CD by some of the same forces, but everything is enhanced here by an alternately spare and startling visual component that makes the set required viewing for anyone interested in maverick composers of the late 20th Century.” Tim Pfaff of the Bay Area Reporter notes, “It has taken the release of a stunning 2-DVD set, Claude Vivier: Reves d'un Marco Polo (Opus Arte), to give his work both the recognition and the broader exposure it warrants. “This set would be invaluable if it were audio only. The discs contain masterful, deeply committed performances of Vivier's most important compositions. The rapt, concentrated sonorities that were uniquely his, and that immediately identify him to those who know his work, emerge in strong, often transfixing performances by some of the world's top new-music specialists… “But these live performances from the Holland Festival last year offer vastly more. Netherlands Opera Artistic Director Pierre Audi has turned them into a fully staged, two-evening program, beginning with Vivier's one completed, hour-long ‘opera,’ Kopernikus (1980), followed by a theater-piece, Reves d'un Marco Polo (‘Dreams of a Marco Polo’ – the article is significant), a canny musical collage crafted by Audi and de Leeuw… “The two outright knock-outs are vocal works, Lonely Child (1980) and Wo bist du, Licht! ("Where are you, Light!"). Musically, Vivier imposes the most daunting ‘extended’ techniques on his singers, whom he not only pushes to the extremes of their ranges but also assigns all manner of other sounds, from speech to whoops. Kathryn Harries makes the sustained outcry of ‘Wo bist du, Licht!’ the kind of real, harrowing emotional outburst that completely takes your mind off its vocal pyrotechnics. Susan Naruki, a new-music specialist Bay Area audiences know well, gives what may be the performance of her career with this Lonely Child (she also recorded an audio version of it for Philips in 1991), which takes naked human sadness to limits few other singers could. Between them, pianist Marc Couroux hammers out the rhapsodic solo-piano Shiraz (1977) with the requisite ferocity and delicacy. “Vivier is quoted as saying, "I do not write my music myself," hinting at the extent to which he saw him self as its channel. Also, ‘Music is love.” “You may watch these DVDs more often than you want to. As de Leeuw says, ‘You can almost feel the music on your skin.’” > Further information on Work: Prologue pour un Marco Polo > News Search |
|