A guide to Henri Dutilleux's music | Music

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A guide to Henri Dutilleux's music

The Frenchman has transformed his astonishing compositional refinement and willingness to take inspiration from other art forms into works of real emotional immediacy

I could do this with any piece of Henri Dutilleux's, the French composer whose 97th birthday is this week. But seeing as it's one of my favourites, we might as well start with his Cello Concerto, Tout un monde lointain, the visionary five-part piece he wrote for Mstislav Rostropovich in 1970. It's music of sumptuous but rigorous splendour, music whose sheer attractiveness belies the refinement of Dutilleux's harmonic and structural imagination, and which seduces you into a faraway world of heightened feeling. I defy you not to be won over by this music.

As one of music history's most fastidious perfectionists, Dutilleux's published works are few. There are two symphonies and other orchestral works, a handful of concertante pieces, a series of pieces for voice and orchestra, and a small but significant canon of chamber music, including a dazzling string quartet, Ainsi la nuit. Together, all of them, from his First Symphony, composed in 1951, to a recent masterpiece, Correspondances from 2003, which sets the letters of artists and writers from van Gogh to Rilke for soprano and orchestra, is proof of a fundamental sometimes little-understood truth about French musical life in the postwar period: there is another way apart from Pierre's (Boulez's, that is). Dutilleux never accepted any of the dogmas of the avant-garde, above all, what Boulez called at one stage the necessity of serialism, a systemisation that's anathema to Dutilleux's creative sensibilities. As Dutilleux told Stuart Jeffries in these pages a decade or so ago when a mere whippersnapper of 86, "I don't speak about him, and he doesn't speak about me. I admire his work for the Ensemble Intercontemporain. He has made his choices and he has the right to make his choices. But there are things I cannot accept, and I don't like people who are never in doubt." (Ironically, the richly decorative surfaces of some of Boulez's recent orchestral music approach – but do not surpass – the refinement and richness of Dutilleux's. A few years later, Dutilleux told Jeffries that at the moment, "I have no problems with [Boulez]. I even like the fact that he is no longer certain, but is a man riven by doubt, as we all should be.")

Dutilleux's anti-ideological approach to music history, his refusal to belong to or to establish a school of composition, despite his decades of teaching at the Paris Conservatoire, and his unashamed continuation of the concerns of earlier and not exclusively French traditions – Debussy, Ravel, Roussel, but also Stravinsky, and Bartók – has created some of the most poetically flexible music of recent decades.

If you listen to his Second Symphony, Le double, or his Violin Concerto, L'arbre des songes (the tree of dreams), you'll hear a rarefied, epicurean beauty that seems to exalt in its fluency and self-contained world of musical coherence. (That fluency of Dutilleux's music is an illusion, however; it's rather a hard-won prize of sometimes years of hard graft and applied craft – and there's another ironic echo of Boulez's mania for revision that Dutilleux is also a meticulous reviser of his pieces.) But that's to miss how Dutilleux's music is so often inspired by other art forms and experiences. Timbres, espaces, mouvements is a vivid orchestral explosion of Dutilleux's way of seeing Van Gogh's hallocinogenic Starry Night; his The Shadows of Time is an astonishing and paradoxically radiant meditation on loss, partly catalysed by Anne Frank's diaries, and written for the 50th anniversary of the end of the second world war; the piece is dedicated to Anne Frank "and all the children, innocents of the world". At the heart of The Shadows of Time is a movement called "memory of shadows" that includes music for three children's voices - an inspirational idea that came from Dutilleux's overhearing the sounds of children in a playground near his studio. The effect is devastating because of its directness, but Dutilleux's music is never mawkishly sentimental.

The influence of Dutilleux's music on the 20th and 21st centuries isn't to be measured in how his work revolutionised the languages of musical possibility, or even in the roster of his pupils (who include Gérard Grisey). Instead, his music is a realisation of a complete world, independent of concerns for cutting-edge contemporaneity, and one that becomes more essential the more you hear it, above all for how he transforms his astonishing compositional refinement into real emotional immediacy. That's something that infuses every bar of Ainsi la nuit, or The Shadows of Time, or Correspondances, or … well, pretty well everything he has published. Happy birthday, Henri.

Cello Concerto: Tout un monde lointain

Métaboles

Timbres, espaces, mouvements

Symphony no. 2, Le double

String Quartet: Ainsi la nuit

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