The music of Thierry Pecou is marked by a frightening level of intensity, where continual instability is nonetheless governed by clear logic. Violent contrasts shock like Webern, but the manner in which they organically unfold makes such juxtapositions easier to follow, with passages of patient calm comfortably perched beside blasts of sheer noise. The performances throughout this disc of orchestral works is captivating, and the recording luminously vivid.
Symphonie du Jaguar proceeds like a kind of intricate, menacing symphonic exotica, with percussion battering like a postmodern Stravinsky, and vocal utterances reminiscent of the polyglot chattering of Messiaen’s Harawi. Also like Messiaen, Pecou is interested here in depicting grand cosmic themes, specifically the ‘great antagonistic forces’ which structured ancient Mayan civilisations: ‘the opposition between the visible, solar world and the invisible, nocturnal world’. Light and dark thus blend and clash, the first movement ‘Volatile’ a display of nervous energy, released in bright tone bursts in the following ‘Tres modere’. ‘Akbal’ involves buzzing didgeridoo-like raspberries and a lurching New Orleans styled march, while the finale ends in a predictable, yet satisfying, explosion of sound.
‘Vague du pierre’ is inspired by Shi Tao, a Chinese literary painter of the seventeenth century, and by Chinese art and philosophy in a broader sense. As such its less directly evocative, but no less dramatic, exploring concepts of time, purpose, and silence, and intended to be listened to ‘as one looks at the mountain with its imposing sides, its unattainable peaks enveloped in mist, or as one contemplates the infinity of the sea’. Moods shift and switch, and the passages of silence which punctuate the piece make the crashing waves of brass and sliding strings all the more exciting. Two magnificent, grand pieces, demonstrating Pecou to be a master of controlling vast sound forces.
Joshua Meggitt
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