A fiercely independent composer, Henri Dutilleux wrote music that is refined, colorful and scrupulously crafted. Symphony No 1, his first purely orchestral score, established his international reputation. Structurally unconventional- it opens, unusually, with a passacaglia- it illustrates his principle of ‘progressive growth’ through its sustained lyricism and towering, chorale-like statements. Metaboles was inspired by the virtuosity of the woodwind section of George Szell’s Cleveland Orchestra. Distinctive instrumentation for each movement allows for deep expression, jazzy rhythms and moments of irony. The enigmatic diptych Les Citations quotes from fellow composers Benjamin Britten and Jehan Alain. After over 40 years at the head of the Orchestre National de Lille (ONL), of which he was the founder, Jean-Claude Casadesus enjoys an international career that has brought seasons in Germany, Russia, Japan, Latvia, and in Lille. His 30 albums with the orchestra have won critical and public acclaim and as a guest conductor he has appeared in Moscow, Singapore, Montreal, Baltimore, Seoul, St. Petersburg and Berlin. He is an enthusiastic champion of contemporary music and set up residences for composers with the Lille orchestra.

Following the success of their previous album, English Music for Strings, John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London turn their attention to the music of Henri Dutilleux. His ballet Le Loup was composed as a commission for Roland Petit’s dance company and premièred in Paris in March 1953. Rarely recorded – this is the first recording by a non-French orchestra – the work unfolds in three tableaux and tells a convoluted tale of a bridegroom who jilts his bride (to run away with a gypsy) by persuading her that he has been changed into a wolf. Over time she discovers that the wolf is real, but her feelings turn from terror to love and when the alarmed villagers hunt the wolf, she defends him and dies at his side. The album is completed by three world première recordings of new orchestrations (by Kenneth Hesketh) of wind solos written for the Paris Conservatoire in the 1940s. Both the Sarabande et Cortège and Sonate pour hautbois are virtuosic tours de force for their soloists, as is the Sonatine pour flûte, which displays the lyricism, agility, and sparkling incisive qualities of the flute in what became Dutilleux’s most-performed work.

This album is part of the 25-disc box set Un siècle de musique fracaise, which explores French music from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. This disc profiles French composer Henri Dutilleux, and include his famous Symphonie no. 1, Tour un monde lointain, and La nuit etoilee.

This new release is the third volume in the Seattle Symphony Orchestra’s Grammy Award-winning Dutilleux cycle. Especially notable on this installment, is the inclusion of a live performance of Dutilleux’s masterpiece “Timbres, espace, mouvement.” German-born violinist Augustin Hadelich is featured on this recording of “Sur le meme accord.” He performs on the 1723 Kiesewetter Stradivarius violin, provided by the Stradivari Society of Chicago.

Henri Dutilleaux's perfectionism resulted in a distinctive and individual musical language of rare poetry and invention. The interplay of stereophonic and polyrhythmic effects and jazzy brass writing in Symphony No. 2 "Le Double" forms, in the composer's own words, 'a musical play of mirrors and of contrasting colours', while Timbres, espaces, mouvement is Dutilleux's response to Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night, a 'longing for the infinity of nature'. The series of snapshots in Mystère de l'instant evokes fleeting and almost magical moments in time, its cumulative power indicative of a consummate composer at the height of his powers.

In honor of what would have been Henri Dutilleux’s one-hundredth birthday, this commemorative box set is being released by The Seattle Symphony. This three-volume series is a critically acclaimed overview of all of Dutilleux’s major works for orchestra. This is an essential collector’s item for any lover of 20th century French music. The individual releases included in this box set have been nominated for a number of honors, included Grammy Award nominations for Best Orchestral Performance, Best Engineered Album, Classical, and received the Grammy Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo by Augustin Hadelich.

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REVIEW:

The defining recording project of Ludovic Morlot’s tenure as music director in Seattle, this luscious three-disc set is a compendium of the orchestral canvases of Henri Dutilleux, whose centenary has been celebrated this year. It’s all played with considerable refinement, but there are particularly special results when the poised violinist Augustin Hadelich joins in for “L’arbre des songes” and “Sur le même accord.”

­– New York Times (David Allen)

Following the Seattle Symphony’s first Grammy®-nominated Henri Dutilleux disc comes the second installment in the Symphony’s venture to record a complete survey of the orchestral music of this late, great, long-lived, and most important French composer whose music has been authoritatively described as “sumptuous… fastidious… rigorous… seductive… non-dogmatic…” – Guardian. This time Ludovic Morlot and his musicians turn their attention to Dutilleux’s most well-known and exciting orchestral work – Métaboles. Augustin Hadelich joins for a performance of the violin concerto, L’arbre des songes, with the disc completed by a performance of the composer’s Second Symphony (“Le Double”), the recordings realized within the spectacular acoustics of Seattle’s Benaroya Hall, and, in the cases of Métaboles and the Symphony No. 2, recorded live in concert. Founded in 1903, the Seattle Symphony continues to be one of America’s leading symphony orchestras. Music Director Ludovic Morlot has been leader of the orchestra since September 2011. Constantly astonishing audiences with his phenomenal technique, poetic sensitivity and gorgeous tone, violinist Augustin Hadelich’s remarkable consistency throughout the repertoire, from Beethoven to Thomas Adès, is seldom encountered in a single artist.

Though Dutilleux began composing at an early age and undertook the rigorous course of study at the Paris Conservatoire, culminating in the much sought-after Prix de Rome in 1938 with a cantata, he regarded his Piano Sonata of 1946-8 as an Opus 1. This attitude was characteristic of a remarkably fastidious and self-critical composer who dedicated his life to composition –and the nurturing of young composers –and yet whose published output is influential out of all proportion to its size. He wrote the sonata for the pianist Geneviève Joy whom he married in 1946. The musical language is as much modal as tonal, owing as much to Bartók’s methods of musical organization and the 19th-century Germanic concept of the large-scale masterpiece as contemporary developments in harmony. Everything he wrote seems to repudiate the commonly held idea that French music is essentially frivolous and charming, but Dutilleux’s music can smile and relax, too: while working at French radio he composed a series of short pastiche pieces as air-filler, later compiling them as a suite, Au gré des ondes. Blackbird is Dutilleux’s sole trespass on the territory of his contemporary Messiaen: knowingly brief and non-naturalistic by comparison, a portrait of the blackbird’s soul more than its song. The Debussian heritage of painting on the piano comes to the fore on the set of Three Preludes composed between 1973 and 1988, while Resonances is a study in timbre built with the composer’s individual technique of pivot notes and chords. As Vittoria Quartararo observes in her booklet introduction, ‘the music of Dutilleux often seems to shift towards a visual level. While the verticality of piano chords can resonate like light does on a black canvas, one’s gaze becomes more horizontal, distant, and at times visionary, detecting the reverberation of a sound transformed in liquid crystal.’

The symphonic universe of Henri Dutilleux is a fascinating one. Mysterious and poetic, always remarkably expressive, his music explores the thousand and one colors of the orchestra with unique mastery. Gustavo Gimeno and the Luxembourg Philharmonic give us a flamboyant reading of three masterpieces from the composer's first creative period, showcasing the superb cello playing of Jean-Guihen Queyras in Tout un monde lointain.

The music in this album spans a forty-year period from 1948 to 1988 and reflects Dutilleux’s stylistic development as a composer. He considered the Sonata to be the first main work in his catalogue and it represents a turning away from tradition and embraces the transformative musical explorations of the day. The Three Préludes are pieces of concentrated atmospheres, ‘a kind of study of timbres’, in the composer’s words, and each are dedicated to a renowned pianist: No. 1 to Arthur Rubinstein, No. 2 to Claude Helffer, and No. 3 to Eugene Istomin. Dutilleux’s lively music for the ballet Le Loup (‘The Wolf’) is heard here in a première recording of the original piano solo version.

REVIEW:

The pianist here is the veteran Jean-Pierre Armengaud, who has recorded a great deal of French piano music and also works as a musicologist. He studied under Geneviève Joy and was also given advice by Dutilleux and, not surprisingly, his performance is much like hers. If it sounds rather more full-blooded that may well be because the excellent new recording is rather better than that provided for Joy in her own recording of 1988 on Erato. Dutilleux also approved of his performances of the Prèludes. His performance of the piano version of Le Loup is sparkling and convincing and sounds like idiomatic piano music. The sleeve notes, in English and French are really helpful and this is a valuable issue.

-- MusicWeb International

Cellist Edgar Moreau, with the WDR Sinfonieorchester and conductor Andris Poga, performs two concertante works from the mid-20th century: Mieczyslaw Weinberg's Concerto in C minor (1956), and Henri Dutilleux's Tout un monde lointain... (1970). Both were premiered by the great Mstislav Rostropovich, which creates a special link with Moreau: in 2014 in Paris, he won the Young Soloist Prize in the Rostropovich Cello Competition. In recent years, interest has grown in the music of the Polish-born Jewish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, who was mentored by Shostakovich. The title Tout un monde lointain... evokes a distant world, and Dutilleux's five-movement work does indeed take us to a very different place from Weinberg's, drawing inspiration from the sensuous poems of Charles Baudelaire. Praising Edgar Moreau's last Erato album, Transmission, Gramophone wrote: "His tone is beautiful, his phrasing rapt, and the intensity of his delivery is magnified in the immediacy of his presence in the sound picture."

Today one of the most highly respected string quartets, the Belcea were established in 1994 at the Royal College of Music in London and studied with the Chilingirian, the Amadeus, and later the Alban Berg quartets. Today one of the most highly respected string quartets, the Belcea were established in 1994 at the Royal College of Music in London and studied with the Chilingirian, the Amadeus, and later the Alban Berg quartets. They recorded for EMI Classics across nearly a decade, between 2000 and 2009, bringing about tremendous versions of quartets by Schubert, Britten, Bartók, and Mozart, to name a few.

"The Belcea Quartet throw every fibre of their beings into the most vivid projection of the masterpieces they undertake." - The Independent "These recordings form a crucial part of our life as a quartet and we hope that over the ensuing years they haven't lost their freshness and sense of adventure." - Krzysztof Chorzelski, violist of the Belcea Quartet

Recorded in: New Broadcasting House, Manchester 16-17 December 1992 Producer(s) Ralph Couzens Sound Engineer(s) Don Hartridge