ECM follows up its astonishing debut of Estonian composer Erkki-Sven
Tüür with a program of further deconstructions. With his architectonic
shovel, Tüür burrows out an idiomatic hovel for himself in the sands of
today’s placid musical shores. Every motif is its own voice, building to
powerful fruition from the smallest of sparks. To start, the Symphony No. 3
(1997) clicks its tongue with a delicate cymbal. Like the corona of a
jazz dream, it wavers through a swarm of failed bass lines and reeds.
The lower strings ascend in a brief march before being drowned by a
vibraphone. The ensuing cloudbursts recall the composer’s wintry Crystallisatio.
Percussion becomes more pronounced as stuttering rhythms break the
first movement into pieces. In the second movement, a glockenspiel
ruptures the high strings as a snare hit unleashes a brass menagerie.
The flute emerges for a solo passage as strings process gently in the
background. The string writing recalls Tüür’s Passion, albeit
transposed to a different key. The symphony ends with a single note from
the vibraphone, dripping like a water clock into mortal darkness.
Tüür’s aesthetic is so fractured that the concerto would seem an anachronism, but his Concerto for Cello and Orchestra
(1996) epitomizes the very essence of his craft, planting as it does a
single generative seed firmly in the soil of introspection. His
background as a rock musician comes through noticeably in his bold
rhythmic choices, while the piece’s single-movement structure ensures
that its signals remain explicitly contained. The vibraphone reprises
its vital role, oozing like plasma from an open wound. It is not the
soloist that arises from within the orchestra, but much the reverse. And
as the vibraphone weaves its way deftly through the orchestra’s open
spaces, a single note on strings hints at relaxation. Tüür gravitates
toward higher notes here, so that even in descending motifs the apex
gains precedence as pedal point. He ends with a celestial cluster, a
galaxy spinning out of control until it implodes.
Lighthouse (1997), for string orchestra, is one of Tüür’s
most cinematic pieces, which, if we are to take the title literally,
would seem to render its eponymous structure from the outside in. We
track its light first, and the afterimage it leaves on the screen, only
to be given view of the mechanism that turns and amplifies its voice in
the night like a siren to the dark ships of its surrender. The lush
scoring painfully picks apart and rebuilds the lighthouse, turning it
inside out, so that its column is now made of light and its reassuring
beam becomes the mortar of its foundation, sweeping its potent arm
through the air and knocking everything in its path. This is not a
violent piece but a purposeful one, sustained by architectural
consciousness. It tells its story in hefty chunks, if always through the
fog of recollection. Its agitation enacts a sort of tragedy, a body
descending from its topmost rail, flailing its appendages helplessly
before the sand engulfs its last breath. Yet the music is anything but
morbid, only mournful in the realization of its own complicity in the
ending of a life, and the beginning of a new one.
Tüür’s aphasic approach has made him one of the most sought-after
composers of our generation, and not without good reason. His stable
foundations allow him to build teetering creations that never quite
tumble. His music works very much like thought, constantly rationalizing
its decisions in hindsight. The most transcendent passages are always
stirred so that they become muddled without obscuring individual colors.
Despite the seemingly disparate elements of these mosaics, Tüür’s is
not a process that imposes itself upon the elements at hand. Rather, it
recognizes and values its inner life and the varied ways in which one
can externalize it.
Comentarios
Publicar un comentario