Archipel des solitudes is a gorgeous setting for mezzo-soprano, chorus, and orchestra of some very evocative poetry by Gilles Gourdon. Here’s a sample: “The spider, Weaver of stars/Has vanished, And the one-eyed sky/Glows. The River rolls her hips/Furtively, The yellow-ochre feluccas/Ascend/From the depths of the ages”. Heavy stuff, and Niels Rosing-Schow (b. 1954) rises to the challenge in providing a glowing, hallucinatory accompaniment that sensitively enhances the poet’s imagery through sound and texture rather than tonality and tunes.
It would be too simplistic to characterize the music as “atonal”, especially when this often raises in the listener’s mind adjectives like “ugly” and “dissonant”. Taken purely as it comes, on its own terms, this is a very beautiful work indeed. Listen for example to the evocative first entry of the chorus, the sensitively sculpted vocal lines, and the clarity of the ear-catching, richly colored instrumental textures. The two purely orchestral movements, Les harpes de la pluie (The Harpes of the Rain) and Avènement (Advent), where we are invited to read the brief poems and then simply listen to the music, reveal just how wonderfully suited Gourdon’s verses are to purely musical expression. No doubt about it, this is a major work, fantastically well performed and recorded.
The same observations hold true for the purely orchestral Windshapes, described in the notes as inspired by Debussy’s La Mer. Rosing-Schow’s music has a much harder edge, being written for winds, piano, harp, and percussion–a Messiaen-like combination. Both the scoring and the harmonic idiom evoke a desolation entirely appropriate to the subject (the bleak last movement is called “Erosion”). The composer sensitively avoids the obvious use of the wind machine until the very end, and then quite surprisingly and mysteriously at that, once again demonstrating his sensitivity to instrumental sound and texture. The real issue in listening to challenging new music is this: Does it not only challenge, but also reward the attentive listener? Rosing-Schow’s works certainly do. His challenges are reasonable, the rewards ample, and certainly worth returning to more than once.
