The Ruysdael Quartet - Quart de Nuit: Ravel, Dutilleux and Debussy (live op het ZOOM! Festival, Nederland 2017) (2020)

It is a sad reality in the world of music that, when a composer dies, his music ends up in limbo for at least ten years, during which time directors and music programmers put their work in a drawer and wait, they say. , to establish your reputation. For a few lucky composers, after that decade has passed, there is a revival. For others, only silence remains.

French composer Henri Dutilleux died in May 2013 at the age of 97. Dutilleux struggled all his life to make himself heard, against the dominant modernism of Pierre Boulez on the one hand and, on the other, the ornithological Catholicism of Olivier Messiaen. Dutilleux was very his, suspicious of doctrines and ideologies. Although he lived in the 4th arrondissement of Paris, his music evokes the fluttering and screeching of a grim night landscape in the countryside, much like Béla Bartók does in his string quartets and György Ligeti in his latest works. Dutilleux's music, although modern in its renunciation of melody, is rooted in organic reality in a sense that Boulez could never achieve and Messiaen only imitated. It could be argued that Dutilleux is the most important French composer of the second half of the 20th century; there it is said.

His work is quite small, but captivating. His 1970 cello concerto tout un monde lointain, written for Rostropovich, uses music as an intermediary between humanity and infinity in a kind of extraterrestrial dialogue. His 1976 string quartet ainsi la nuit explores the individual's fears and hopes when darkness looms over a lunar landscape. There are glimpses of Bartók and Webern, as well as an unmistakable aftertaste of Ravel, whose music seems to be updated to contemporary demands. The quartet is made up of seven movements with devilish writing for the string players, as well as numerous noises produced on the instruments themselves. The finale is titled ‘Suspended Time’, and is received as if it were a gift. For almost 20 minutes, Dutilleux takes us out of the relentless march of progress, entering an Einsteinian space-time relativity. It works better than meditation, and much better than most forms of self-medication.

The Dutch Ruysdael Quartet offers an exciting reading of ainsi la nuit, located between Ravel's Quartet in F major and an arrangement of Debussy's Clair de lune. This is a great album that leaves me wanting more, especially more Dutilleux.