I've just received CDs of the complete works by Klangforum Wien. I'm looking forward to the first serious amount of Barraque-listening in years.

Started off with what is possibly my favourite Barraque work - the Concerto for clarinet, vibraphone + 6 instrumental groups. It was interesting to compare this to the Ensemble 2e2m version. The latter's duration is 26'48" whereas the KW version is 33'35" - a serious difference, or so it might appear. I do enjoy both versions, but the KW is likely to become the favourite: it's more expressive and dramatic, makes more telling use of silence (unsurprisingly), and architecturally presents more of an edifice. Ensemble 2e2m is well-behaved and precise, cool and neat. One problem I'd not considered (before hearing KW) is the recording: it's rather distant, but more seriously, displays an element which annoys me more and more about some digital recordings - the lack of treble frequencies. Apart from anything else, this plays havoc with the timbre: the instruments sound too similar and in tuttis certain instruments become masked. On KW the harpsichord, for instance, is heard in all its glory.

I'll post some impressions on other pieces after a couple of more listenings: I was fairly horrified by the KW account of Sequence, so I'd better check. In the meantime, I'd be interested to hear from anyone who, like myself, finds Barraque's music far more rewarding than much of that by supposed "related" composers, or who has views to share about these recordings (or indeed, any others).

Jean Barraqué was one of the French homo-sexualist school, other prominent members of which included Francis Poulenc and Camille Saint-Saëns to name but two. He was short-sighted, difficult to get along with, and could be very jealous. He was also - again following Poulenc - something of a glutton and could be described as an habitual drunkard, even. It was drink which in the end was his undoing - and that has not for good composers been a particularly common end.

In 1952 he began as David Macey tells us a "passionately stormy affair which lasted two or three years with Paul-Michel Foucault" (another French homo-sexualist considered by some to have been a philosopher and by others no more than a psychologist or sociologist - although in 1970 he described himself as none of these but rather as a "specialist in the history of systems of thought"). Here are their photographs and it will at once be evident to percipient Members that the site of their first meeting must have been the wallflower section of Boulez's circle - although as has so often been said individual taste can be unpredictable:


As is known Barraqué was of the avant-garde musically speaking, and he said, significantly, that "to write music just for pleasure, as Rossini did, is no longer possible." Well! There he could not have been more wrong. What a weak grasp of history and in particular musical history he seems to have had! There are so many cultured people who rightly prefer Johann Strauss Junior's Blue Danube or Wiener Blut to any of the productions of Barraqué. (Indeed if we may say so even our own string quartets, combining the best features of the styles of Mozart and Scryabine, are preferable to M. Barraqué's fundamentally inaesthetic sounds. We do know, because we have long possessed recordings of four or five of his productions.) And then there is Broch - an admirable if somewhat ponderous writer in our view - have many Members read for instance his Massenwahntheorie (Theory of Mass Delusion), by no means the only worthwhile book we have come across abandoned in a first-class carriage of a German express? - anyway it was at his friend Foucault's instigation that Barraqué in 1954 read the Frenched Death of Vergil, but in the mind of Barraqué Broch and his Vergil became in the end more of an obsession than much else did not they.

It is we feel a shame really that he fell to such an extent under the influence and pressures of the avant-garde because had he not he might have led a much happier life and written much better music.

Perhaps in a subsequent message we shall say a word about the details of his famous but seldom performed Piano Sonata. How for instance does it compare with Boulez's Second? It (at least in Woodward's rendition) is not at all like, we think - all that repetition especially in its first movement reminds us much more of Ravel's Bolero does not it? - what do other Members think?

I have NOT received the following PM from Syd:

We notice that Mr. Harp has initiated a thread dedicated to our quartets. For this we thank him! We have indeed in the past hinted that, such as they are, our works for the medium may at some juncture be made available upon which for members should they wish to comment.

...except that there is no evidence that Saint-Saëns was a homosexual.  He was often accompanied by Chausson on walks near the Eiffel Tower and was quoted by him as "leering at ladies in a most ungentlemanly manner".

To what extent does Hodeir's line reflect Barraque's intention? To me it sounds not a little bogus and deterministic.

One trouble with the Barraque piano sonata is the almost absurd difficulty of rendering the piece as a gradual morendo as suggested by the Hodeir note. The composer's use of dynamics and the placement of silences seem to tell a fascinating alternative story (at least to me).

There is in this piece, (as interpreted by Herbert Henck, now) a correlation between quietness of dynamic and the introspective, existential questioning; conversely, louder passages sound like outbursts, extroverted and eloquent. The silences, then, are some 'natural continuation' of the quieter passages.

I think, though, that quiet and moribund should not be closely correlated in the interpretation -- it occurs to me that the piece can be a study in dissociating these two qualities. In Henck's version (and is this a problem with the piece itself or not?), there is no "quiet urgency" or the converse of that, a loud stasis. Silences always grow out of the sound, never feel like interruptions. Am I wrong to find this problematic? Or am I even just wrong to hear it that way?

Henck (whose recording I would ultimately recommend highly) is known for his almost clinical precision in adhering to text, though I'm not among those who think it's antiseptic as well, generally... I think it would have been great to hear Roger Woodward on this one. I have never heard that performer in any context, for generational and geographical reasons.

I'll give it several more listens and see what evolves. Those are just my initial thoughts, hypotheses with room to grow.

Well put!

Ian - I'd be very interested to read any views you have on the relative merits (or lack of them) of different recordings, or even performances of the Sonata. And, since you've performed it yourself, maybe some words about your approach, problems encountered, etc. - anything, really, that the rest of us would not have had the opportunity to consider.

Chant apres chant

This is a terrific performance. Given the amount of percussionists and the dynamic writing for them, it must be a nightmare to a) balance and b) achieve any sense of tight ensemble. This recording scores highly on both. I'm impressed with the singer as well: clear-voiced but with the angst not overstated. And pretty accurate (apart from, strangely, the opening phrase) - no mean feat considering that pitch-wise, note-transference is less in evidence here than in any other Barraque work - and, of course, the vocal writing is far more demanding than that of Sequence. Although the musical polarities are well communicated, the notion of specific pitch seems more tenuous than with other performances I've heard: even the piano (the writing is quite different from that of other works) seems like a non-pitched percussion instrument part of the time.