A powerful creative force around which so many younger composers gravitated, his recognisable style admired for its ability to shape and twist time and space like no other, Louis Andriessen has decided to finally call time on an extraordinary artistic journey. The sad news was announced at the end of last year by Andriessen’s wife, violinist Monica Germino, that the composer is now living with dementia.

Somewhere along the line, time has become memory in Andriessen’s music. Autobiographical clues hid inside the musical narratives and subplots of later works such as Mysteriën (‘Mysteries’) and Theatre of the World. Now all the puzzle’s pieces have been laid out on the table for us all to see.

In the Introduction, no sooner have two sets of agitated oscillating patterns in piano, marimba and winds got going (in trademark Andriessen fashion) than competing high strings hover above, stating a Brahmsian lullaby-like melody. The music shudders to a halt after barely a minute and a half, confused, as if unsure where to go.

The mezzo-soprano’s lone first entry – performed with vivid characterisation here by Nora Fischer – restores temporary order but the text, replete with surreal, stream-of-consciousness thoughts and impressions by Flemish poet Delphine Lecompte, also refuses to settle. Lost, the music either takes comfort in the ghosts of musical memories past (ranging from mariachi music and self-quotation to statements of the ‘Dies irae’) or gets trapped in obsessive two-chord grooves. As Timo Andres writes in his excellent booklet notes, this is Andriessen ‘stripped down to his essence, all the component parts of his language laid bare’. The song-cycle feels ‘jarringly personal, as though Andriessen is subjecting his music to Freudian analysis’.

Almost like life itself, it’s all over before you’ve had time to pause and reflect. Andriessen’s music has never been as ‘straight to the point’ as this. His appetite for architectonic, cathedral-like structures (De tijd, Hadewijch), has shrunk to husk-like proportions. Andriessen’s final work, May, premiered in December 2020 (and written in memory of Baroque conductor and recorder virtuoso Frans Brüggen), was a cathartic emptying-out of musical memories. The Only One seems overburdened by them. Complex yet direct, it nevertheless serves as a fitting, if sad, farewell to a composer equally deserving of that description.