Henri Dutilleux - Le loup; La fille du diable; etc. (Pascal Rophé)

Information

Composer: Henri Dutilleux

• (01) Le loup, ballet
• (04) Trois sonnets de Jean Cassou
• (07) La fille du diable, film score
• (13) Quatre mélodies
• (17) Trois tableaux symphoniques

Vincent Le Texier, baritone
Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire
Pascal Rophé, conductor

Date: 2015
Label: BIS Records
https://bis.se/label/bis/henri-dutilleux-le-loup

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Review

This is my third review of work by Henri Dutilleux in as many months, implying a certain premature zeal on behalf of record companies keen to mark Dutilleux’s centenary year in 2016. Subtitled ‘Song, Stage and Screen: the lesser-known Dutilleux’, this programme represents the younger Henri, presumably needing to put bread on the table, employing his talents as a resourceful orchestrator and as a purveyor of well-heeled mood music commissioned from film, ballet and stage directors. And given the settled narrative that currently exists around Dutilleux’s mature concert music – that he reduced everything that surrounded him, from Ravel and Messiaen to jazz, into a cultivated compositional purée – knowing that Dutilleux could also turn on a wicked ear for pastiche, and was not above full-frontal kitsch, acts as a useful corrective.

The music he composed for Henri Decoin’s 1946 film La fille du diable and for a 1945 Paris stage adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which he recycled as Trois Tableaux symphoniques, is grounded in the gestural vocabulary of Hollywood’s best: composers like Franz Waxman and Dimitri Tiomkin. This music might play it safe harmonically but Dutilleux splashes orchestral timbres around with the abandon of an action painter, as blood-curdling swoops from an ondes martenot add local colour. Pascal Rophé and his Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire take these scores at face value, carving through notes with flamboyant cliffhanger urgency.

But the standout work is Le Loup, Dutilleux’s 1953 ballet score, recorded only once before in 1954 and talked up habitually as a neglected masterwork. Personally, I’m not so sure. Rophé lends the 30-minute structure symphonic grandeur but, three decades after Stravinsky had reset the debate regarding ballet music, Dutilleux’s score sounds functional and reheated – bitonality pilfered from Ravel’s Boléro (just as that 1946 film score keeps threatening to mutate into Daphnis et Chloé) with a palpable Les Six-derived energy keeping the music afloat. More pertinent to Dutilleux’s future is the aphoristic Trois Sonnets de Jean Cassou (1954), sung with gossamer delicacy by Vincent Le Texier, the discreet, cryptic lyricism characteristic of Dutilleux’s later work now in clear evidence.

-- Philip Clark, Gramophone

More reviews:
MusicWeb International  RECORDING OF THE MONTH
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dutilleux-Vincent-Orchestre-National-BIS1651/dp/B0184EYX9W

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Henri Dutilleux (2 January 1916 – 22 May 2013) was a French composer. His work, which garnered international acclaim, followed in the tradition of Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, and Albert Roussel, but in an idiosyncratic style. Some of his notable compositions include a piano sonata, two symphonies, a cello concerto, a violin concerto and a string quartet. Some of these are regarded as masterpieces of 20th-century classical music. A perfectionist with a strong sense of artistic integrity, he allowed only a small number of his works to be published and often repeatedly revised them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Dutilleux

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Pascal Rophé (born 16 June 1960 in Paris) is a French conductor. Rophé studied at the Conservatoire de Paris and also worked with Pierre Boulez and David Robertson. From 2006 to 2009, Rophé was musical director of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Liège. In September 2014, Rophé became musical director of the Orchestre national des Pays de la Loire. In 2016, he recorded with the orchestra works by Dutilleux to mark the composer's centenary, including Le Loup, 3 Sonnets de Jean Cassou and Fille du Diable. Rophé was re-appointed as orchestra director in 2017 for three years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_Roph%C3%A9

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