LDV74

FLORIAN NOACK 27 The Visions fugitives op.22 (Fleeting visions) is a set of twenty short, elliptical pieces. ‘They tend towards something that one would like to describe as essential. But such assertiveness would seem tome to betray one of the great truths of thework: that it is a cluster of small question marks.’ To confront it is to interrogate another aspect of artistic creation, which we sometimes think is made up of statements and opinions. However, in Florian Noack’s opinion, musical creation can just as easily be characterised by absence of viewpoint. If contemporary art has left a vast space for the nihil or the interrogative form, the Visions fugitives are perhaps one of its many prefigurations. They authorise the interpreter to be a passer rather than a bearer . A passer of impressions and uncertainties rather than the bearer of a predeterminedmessage, thewhys andwherefores of which they have understood, and of which the music born under their fingers would form the synthesis. The exercise allows the composer freedoms that are unusual in hismusic. The freedom, for example, not to be himself. ‘Sometimes the influence of Poulenc is palpable. Sometimes it sounds like Ravel, when the emotion is held on a string so tight that it might break at any moment.’ These delicate harmonic constructions are tiny cathedrals of the ineffable. They recall the words of Golaud, who – on seeing Mélisande’s eyes – exclaims: ‘I am less far from the great secrets of the other world than from the smallest secret of those eyes.’