Alain Damiens: Clarinette

On this CD:

1. Charisma, for clarinet & cello
Composed by Iannis Xenakis
Performed by Alain Damiens, InterContemporain Ensemble [members of]

2. Trio
Composed by Haim
Performed by Alain Damiens, InterContemporain Ensemble [members of]

3. Lied Vl
Composed by Jacques Lenot
Performed by Alain Damiens, InterContemporain Ensemble [members of]

4. Mythologie for clarinet, trombone, viola & harp, No 2 "Orion"
Composed by Philippe Fenelon
Performed by Alain Damiens, InterContemporain Ensemble [members of]

5. Discours IV
Composed by Vinko Globokar
Performed by Alain Damiens, InterContemporain Ensemble [members of]

Alain Damiens: Clarinette, Music, Alain Damiens, Philippe Fenelon, Vinko Globokar, Haim, Jacques Lenot, Iannis Xenakis, Ensemble InterContemporain [members of], Chamber, Chamber Music, Classical, Duo for Mixed Instruments without Keyboard, Miscellaneous, Miscellaneous Music

Average customer rating:

haute clarinet

Alain Damiens: Clarinette

Manufacturer: Adda
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

Duets | Chamber Music | Classical | Styles | Music
General | Chamber Music | Classical | Styles | Music
General | Classical | Styles | Music
ASIN: B000001NH2
Release Date: 1995-11-20

Customer Reviews:

haute clarinet.......2005-09-03

Damiens is a devoted commited clarinetist,who has been cultivating the post-war avant-garde repertoire. Here he engages his fellow French IRCAM cadre of composers/musicians, those sequestered when working in the bowels of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, where Pierre Boulez was given just-about- carte blanche to formulate sort of a mecca for contemporary expression in music. Vinko Globokar,trombonist/composer was a founding member before jettisoned by Boulez; who had the responsibility for creative work within solo unaccompanied genres, and bringing his fully combustible sense of exposed/extended timbre to works of the post-war-avant-garde. The French and this mileau,mostly situated in Paris has been carrying the torch of modernity,never sucombing to fad or fashion save for their own romantic indulgences,looking backwards many times for imagery and subject matter. You will never find politics as a subject at IRCAM, it is too dirty a means to encumber the highly refined air of cool abstraction; the pathways of alienating/reified projects usually centered around what the computer can do,vigorous acoustics how it can assist and varying degrees of agendas to study timbre,in depth; spectral analysis of overtones and how they might come to be utilized in composition.The human element in this work for the most part is itself alienated and made expressively one-dimensional.The results are indeed magical when the human element is engaged as in Peter Eotvos's playfully exciting theatre-like pieces he has written within the same sterile walls. If this sounds a bit sterile, much of the music you will hear has a similar agenda, "cloning" itself after each other.(See Georgina Born's elemental book on IRCAM). But Globokar in the founding years of IRCAM the Seventies was a live-wire subversively unrefined for IRCAM's internal centralized politics someone who didn't accept fully the sterile institutionalization of avant-garde expression as Boulez and Berio had done to butter their bread where it should be.
Here you find the clarinet "Discours" IV of Globokar. The "Discours" series is like a diary for Vinko, there are numerous of utilzations of unadulterated tribes of families of instruments, naturally the one for five trombones is the most intense after Globokar's encyclopedic knowledge of the particles/fragments of trombone sound,muted, with multiphonics(singing and playing simultaneously) he has cultivated his entire 50 year career. There is one for five oboes (also recorded),a piano one, a saxophone Discours, and here with Damiens the helmsman here stirring a course of clarinet timbral subversion. You get a fair amount of "noises", from the clarinets, smears,chirps, wurps, cuus, babbles, atonal lines as well, slap tongue lower register,fluttertonguing ideas, percussive, and the result is a marvelous sonic canvas of timbre, all that no one has ever heard prior.
The tiny Xenakis piece, "Charisma" is a wonderful circumvention of function a tailending of the Clarinet timbre to the violoncello, one feeds off the other, and could not be conceived otherwise without each other's timbre, Where the clarinet stops for example in the lower, "schala-moe" register, deeply the cello picks up with identical dark tones,to contune ti into further penumbrality at times. Xenakis loves the extremities of expression,flipping the rhytmic switch of violence where it is always in the creative mix and you find it even here, scaling the higher piercing clarinet registers as well with high pencil thin cello harmonics.Then percussive effects/affects, of plucked strings. The ending finds the cellist tuning the C-String down an octave, like a slow glissando, the music is saying we need to turn off the power now. To write music you must also know when the materials are enough, and here as in most Xenakis, it all has a wonderful compact shape. He seems to know how far he can pummel,subject his audiences with the extendedly intense end-of-the-world-like incessant timbral displays, and volleys of sound that jump registers instantaneously.
Other-wordly the Fenelon good composer quite inventive here,yet next to the Xenakis is quite tame. The myths he is portraying has a kind of darkness,again the French have a poverty in music at least for viable conceptual means and imagery. The work with ample sustained sounds seem all pre-planned in its direction.You can follow it easily. This work has a one-dimensional quality,likewise the Lenot piece was less interested, and the Haim Trio is a wonder of exposed lines, the genre of the Trio is always a fascinating one to see the actual "voice" of the composer, like a DNA signature. The performances all have a clarity a shrpness, like a thid person like detachment much of the time,that is necessary in many moments for the music.

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