On August 16, the Salzburg Festival ended its focus on the French composer Gérard Grisey with a complete performance of his cycle “Les espaces acoustiques” by the Austrian ORF Symphony Orchestra and Maxime Pascal conducting. It was an hour and a half during which the music’s timbral and structural richness occupied the brain’s entire perceptive capacity. The first time I heard Grisey’s music was in a seminar room in college. We had weekly courses devoted to contemporary repertoire, and they often left me cold. In pieces of Boulez, Stockhausen, and other post-war titans, I would find myself playing a game of trying to follow along with the incredibly complex scores as a way to pass the time.“Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil” changed all that. It was music of gripping beauty and, essentially, emotional immediacy. Six years later, I’m still fascinated with Grisey’s relatively small, potent output. In this playlist, I wrote about some of my favorite works. Two composers familiar with his music, Joshua Fineberg and Arash Yazdani, contributed selections as well.
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