Now in his early forties, Pascal Dusapin is gradually increasing his standing in progressive circles as a distinctive French modernist of the post-Boulez generation. What I’ve heard doesn’t encourage me to regard him as highly as Grisey or Murail, but the three works on this CD make abundantly clear that his music merits serious attention.
The ‘operatorio’ La melancholia (1991) establishes a mood that is maintained in the two later works as well, with a kaleidoscopic text, printed in full in the booklet but set in a way that makes it difficult to follow in performance. The solo vocal writing is often uncompromisingly direct in its rhetoric – no Gallic reticence here – and this forthrightness is, understandably, one of Dusapin’s most admired characteristics. He is strong on lament, favouring a broodingly sustained music which normally moves at a very deliberate pace yet can generate waves of turbulence without, for me, ever quite dispelling the suspicion that the effect is more static than is good for it.
I find that the character of all three pieces – Extenso dates from 1994, Apex from 1995 – leaves something to be desired in comparison with stronger creative personalities. It is less raw than Xenakis (with whom Dusapin has often been compared), less mesmerizingly terse than Scelsi, less dynamic than Richard Barrett or James Dillon. Nevertheless, if you enjoy sustained demonstrations of louring menace, kitted out in fascinatingly diverse sonic outfits, these admirable performances, recorded with no-less admirable clarity, are well worth investigating.'