This disc shows exactly how a French composer copes with having been a pupil of Messiaen at a time when a Messiaen pupil of an earlier generation, Pierre Boulez, is the dominant figure in French musical life. Tristan Murail (b. 1947) has been composing for long enough to have defined his own particular qualities of style and technique, and the result is imaginative and undoctrinaire. Messiaen's visionary simplicity and Boulez's technological refinement both play a part, but there is nothing narrowly derivative, still less negatively 'nationalist', about Murail's work.
The earliest and longest piece, Territoires de l'oubli for piano (1977), may have an enigmatic title, but the music is forthrightly unambiguous in its exploration of the instrument's constantly shifting resonances. The manner is more expressionistic than that of the later works, and there is also a greater tendency for the music to rely on quite static textures to drive home Murail's fundamental perceptions about sounds in space. Fortunately the performance by Dominique My is totally persuasive in its pacing, and recorded (as are all three works) with maximum naturalness.
Territoires de l'oubli is a considerable achievement, beginning like a post-war version of a Debussy Etude and proceeding as if determined to exorcise the ghosts of the twin peaks of recent French piano music, Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux and Boulez's Second Sonata. The two later pieces are less aggressive, and Vues aeriennes (1981) is indeed fairly slight, for all the subtlety of its interplay between a solo horn and a piano trio. But Allegories (1990) is a strong, memorable composition, using live electronics to clothe the instruments with special brightness, and also with remarkable depth of resonance. The title suggests the distance between a work's ideal, implied models and materials and what we actually hear, but there is no sense of second best in Murail's spell-binding blend of sensuality and serious thought.AW