For those who might be put off by Henri Pousseur’s close association with the hard atonal music of Boulez or Stockhausen, fear not! Aquarius-Memorial, a large, generous work cast in four sections, is unafraid to be pretty, lush, rousing, touching, or melodic. Pousseur, like many of his avant-garde contemporaries, experimented with open forms, scores in which certain performance parameters are left to the discretion of the performers. But this recording is a good example of the fact that when a score is left open, a performance of the piece should not be: it still can have direction and focus and a feeling of completeness. It’s clear that these players carefully thought out their performance, start to finish.
The piece straddles the line between symphony and concerto, and the first movement, “Les Litanies d’Icare”, is scored for piano solo. Without knowledge of Pousseur’s musical schemes–his incorporation of more free-form sections–this movement would read as any piece of music, being full of direction and interesting contrasts as well as gorgeous harmonies. Here the intelligent pianism of Frederic Rzewski is essential for the movement’s total success, not just in its execution but in its form and shape. He plays with an aggressive-yet-rounded tone that makes a disproportionately long solo venture sound as symphonic as the rest of the work.
The next two movements, “Danseurs gnidiens cherchant la perle clémentine” and “Les Fouilles de Jérusona”, are strict symphonic stuff, and Pousseur’s use of the available forces is striking and full of invention. The slow, aching plod of “Les Fouilles” balances the frantic, multi-sectional “Danseurs”, edge-of-the-seat music that features surprising twists and turns. When in the final “Icare aux Jardins du Verseau” Pousseur recalls the piano, it is like the return of a welcome friend. Rzewski’s cadenza and the shocking moment of orchestral re-entry immediately following are worth the price of the disc. Pierre Bartholomée, at the helm of the Beethoven Academie, leads a thoughtfully planned, precise, ebullient, sonically clean and clear performance, all the more impressive when you discover–owing to the applause at the end–that it was recorded live!
