♢ 2021 | best albums of the year ♢
Jürg Frey – I Listened to the Wind Again
Louth Contemporary Music Society, 2021
contemporary classical, reductionism
Whether it be the natural elements, the elusive trait of a still life painting, or a page of bucolic poetry, the compositional language of Jürg Frey cannot help but dialogue with the ineffable and the intangible, seeking a mimesis that sometimes skims its appearance, almost always its deep, concealed essence. We can thus discern the two main declinations of his aesthetics: on the one hand, the longing for a presque rien as the seat of an expressiveness to its lowest terms, entirely preceding music (l’âme est sans retenue I, 120 Pieces of Sound); on the other hand, the lyrical blossoming inspired by the pictorial surface and the written word, metaphysical transpositions of sensory experience and inner life (Grizzana and Other Pieces 2009-2014, Collection Gustave Roud).
Of the latter sort, the chamber score “I Listened to the Wind Again” (2017) represents to this day one of the most intense and paradigmatic distillates: a compendium in which instrumental whisper and singing are equivalent, they intertwine to the point of seeming univocal, as if originating from the same blow of a placid breeze across the plains. It is no coincidence that, late last year, the Louth Contemporary Music Society itself presented a similarly inspired string trio by Linda Catlin Smith (“Meadow”), launching a series of recordings entitled ‘Out of Silence’: a close-up perspective on the most recent developments of the reductionist current headed, in particular, by the international collective Wandelweiser, of which Frey has been one of the main exponents since the early 1990s.
a rain as soft as a mist begun to descend
fragments of harmonies, glints in the landscape
the soul moves along each motionless phrase
(Gustave Roud)
The faint unison of strings, clarinet and bowed vibraphone unfolds, as if dancing, in a still landscape outside of time. Equally clear, poisedly emphatic is the enunciation of soprano Hélène Fauchère, monody of an uncorrupted nature sublimating into word, whether it be an autonomous phoneme or an accomplished verbal texture.
The verses by the composer himself – a fragmentary, even telegraphic evocation of images/impressions without solution of continuity – are mixed with those of Swiss poets Gustave Roud and Pierre Chappuis alongside the equally crystalline gaze of the Chinese Bai Juyi (VIII-IX century AD), ode and lament to the life cycle of grasslands.
Afar, its scent invades the ancient road,
Its emerald green overruns the ruined town.
Again I see my noble friend depart,
With feelings deep as grass, overtaking my heart
(Bai Juyi)
But in the ensemble’s gradual, apparently imperturbable tonal transitions, two mirror epiphanic moments make a breach: past the first half of the piece and again near the end, for a few minutes, the strings open themselves into harmonies with an almost neo-romantic flair, pure assonance becomes enveloping consonance and Fauchère’s vibratos caress the sacral elevation of Dawn Upshaw in Górecki’s Third Symphony.
The last nuance manifesting itself, however, is that of an impending disquiet: at first a punctuation and underlining of the dominant notes, the percussions intermittently introduce single beats, moderate but solemn, which would seem to invalidate the idyll preserved until now. Thus surfaces a sinister omen that gets toned down only by the last poetic remnants: just four lines, those of the Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan, but nonetheless infused with a transfiguring elegiac power, complementary to the profound expressive absorption of Jürg Frey’s music.
Dear soul we will apart
I becoming thinner than
dust, you, yearning
for a strange openness
(Etel Adnan)
