Judith Schor opens her booklet text by asking whether French music means “enchanting lightness, ever-changing colourfulness, charming irony”. Henri Dutilleux wanted nothing to do with French lightness. He was his own greatest critic and fought vehemently against being assigned to any school, tendency or group; however much he admired Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Darius Milhaud, he felt far removed from their lightness. For him composing was “a kind of ceremony”, to be undertaken seriously, “a bit like love”. He wrote “Métaboles” at the height of his powers for the 40th anniversary of the Cleveland Orchestra, which gave the premiere under George Szell in January 1965. The five movements, running without a break from Incantatoire to Flamboyant, follow the principle of metamorphosis in nature: each is developed from elements of the one before and subjects what has already been “said” to analytical reflection.
Olivier Messiaen, the son of an English professor and Shakespeare specialist and of a poet, combined Gregorian chant with the sound of the Javanese gamelan and the metres of Greek verse with the scales of Indian ragas; on his travels he recorded birdsong and, precisely notated, made it the basis of his compositions. To this were added a deep Catholic faith and his synaesthesia: Messiaen associated sounds with colours. “Les Offrandes oubliées”, a symphonic meditation of about eleven minutes, was premiered in Paris in 1931 as his first orchestral work. The 22-year-old described it as an altar triptych: “The Cross”, a lament of the strings “pierced by deep grey and mauve-coloured sighs”, is followed after a sharp transition by “Sin”, a run into the abyss at an almost mechanical speed; in the “Eucharist” a shimmer and glitter grows into a spherical melody. Messiaen interpreted sin as the forgetting of God, the Cross and the Eucharist as divine offerings.
Mozart was Messiaen’s favourite composer; what delighted him above all was the colour and lightness of his music. The analysis of Mozart’s works played a prominent role in Messiaen’s composition teaching at the Paris Conservatoire, and in 1990 he published the results in the book “Les 22 concertos pour piano de Mozart”. For the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s death in 1991 he paid him a personal tribute with “Un Sourire”: Mozart had gone hungry and cold and lost almost all his children, “and despite it all he always smiled”; so he, too, had tried to smile, with a little piece lasting nine minutes. It was premiered on 5 December 1991, shortly before Messiaen’s death. Rhythm, the assignment of colours to sounds and birdsong shape this late orchestral work; it ends in A major, a sound to which Messiaen assigned the colour blue.
Ravel is another matter entirely: in 1909 Sergei Diaghilev commissioned from him a ballet score for his Ballets russes, based on the late antique story of Daphnis and Chloé. “Daphnis et Chloé, Fragments Symphoniques, 2e Série” (1913) draws on the final part of the ballet: the sunrise of the “Lever du jour”, the Pantomime, in which a flute solo evokes the song of Syrinx and Daphnis is united with Chloé, and the feverish “Danse générale”. Everything that is absent from Dutilleux’s “Métaboles”, Judith Schor writes, Ravel lets bubble forth here. As general music director from 2016 to 2021, Julia Jones shaped the artistic direction of the Sinfonieorchester Wuppertal with new concert and outreach formats; in January 2020 the orchestra returned to a sold-out Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. “Un Sourire” was recorded on 18 February 2018, the other works on 20 January 2019, both in the Historische Stadthalle Wuppertal.