| Sept prières pour un canard sauvage ( Seven Prayers For a Wild Duck) |
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Alto and bass flutes:Pierre Roullier Oboe, oboe d'amore, English horn: Lazlo Hadady Clarinet and bass clarinet: Claude Faucomprez Horn: Jens MacNamana Bassoon: Marc Vallon |
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The first version of this work was written to a commission by the Comédie Française for Alain Françon's staging of Ibsen's The Wild Duck in December 1993. As I usually do when it comes to theatre or cinema, I sought the most appropriate musical metaphor for Ibsen's text, from what constitutes its profound drama: I captured this call from "the bottom of the sea", where wounded wild ducks "dive and cling with the beak in the seaweed". In the play, this insidiously becomes the subconscious attached to the character of the little Edvig, the attic where the wild duck lives, and the vengeance of the forest. With the passing of time, I wanted to have this music played in concert, in a new form, since I like the sound I revealed here with the wind quintet, outside any stylistic reference: I essentially sought the greatest blending of timbres, harmonic colours almost precious, and great fluidity of lines. D.L.2003
As in the case of Nerone blues, this cycle for wind quintet derives from music written for a production of Ibsen's The Wild Duck directed by Alain Françon (Comédie-Française, 1993). The seven successive Prayers are almost all based on a four-note motif stated at the outset: B (long tenuto), D, B flat, G, like an allusion to a key of G major/minor. This cell appears quite clearly at the beginning of the second prayer (where it is even heard in canon between the flute in G and the oboe), the fourth, fifth and, in a more remote fashion, seventh (final phrase of the English horn). The beginning of the sixth prayer, without bringing back the cell, starts on the single note of B (bass flute and bass clarinet in unison), a reminiscence of the work's beginning. These reminders or signals thus confirm the auditory impression of a cycle. Denis Levaillant assigns the wind quintet a veritable palette of sonorities by occasionally using several instruments of the same family (bass flute and flute in G, clarinet and bass clarinet, oboe, oboe d'amore and English horn) and by diversifying the musical situations. "In Drawn-out Time"(first prayer) or "Like an Organ" (third prayer) are a few of the notions expressed in the score, but the entire work reveals significant modifications in the expressive treatment of the musical material. This somewhat serene music strikes the listener with the wealth and proportioning of the means brought into play, including the micro-intervals in the third prayer that may remind one of spectral music. Symbol of a desire not to completely cut the links with the past, the seventh prayer (entitled The Forest Takes its Revenge in the stage production) evokes a consonant ending in A flat major, the third of the chord being provided by the flute's aeolian sounds... The work was premiered by the Nielsen Quintet in March 1995, in its original version. |
