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QUATUOR HERMÈS 19
The Dutilleux Quartet has also counted a great deal in your career. It’s a
piece that has brought you luck: in 2009, it sat alongside the Ravel on the
programme of the Lyon Chamber Music Competition, at which you won
First Prize. And at the Geneva Competition in 2011,
Ainsi la nuit
was on the
programme again, along with Beethoven, in the finale that earned you
the First Prize there.
We took the Dutilleux Quartet into our repertoire not long after the Ravel. In 2008,
in preparation for the Lyon Competition, we spent a whole week together reading
through the work. It was a fairly disconcerting experience: we found ourselves
faced with a large-format, very graphic score, and quite extraordinary music from
which all barlines are banished. It’s rather frightening to begin with, and it’s very
tricky to put the work together, but once you’ve done that you feel the deployment
of an organic matter, and over and above the complexity of the writing you’re
gripped by an immense poetry.
In this piece, rigour is placed at the service of a musical gesture: the quartet has
a visual, ‘choreographic’ dimension that listeners often mention when we talk to
themafter our concerts. Dutilleux also leaves roomfor anelement of improvisation:
‘The rhythmic values should not be observed too strictly’, he specifies at certain
points.
Ainsi la nuit
displays a genuine art of orchestration, making perfect use of
the different registers of the instruments.