COMPOSERS: Dalbavie
LABELS: NAIVE
ALBUM TITLE: Dalbavie Violin Concerto
WORKS: Violin Concerto; Color; Ciaccona
PERFORMER: Eiichi Chijiiwa (vln), Orchestre de Paris, Christophe Eschenbach
CATALOGUE NO: MO 782162
Marc-André Dalbavie (b1961) may be something of an unknown quantity to British audiences, but with this youngish French composer’s Piano Concerto scheduled for performance at this year’s Proms this disc offers a rare chance to get a head start on his fascinating music. He advocates transformation as a key element in the compositional process, which sounds forbidding (and which lends itself to his electroacoustic work) but which is actually elegantly logical. He also does intriguing things with the spatial aspect of live performance, dividing his instrumentalists and distributing them within the auditorium in unconventional but entirely
musical ways.
Expertly orchestrated and highly listenable, Dalbavie’s compositions evoke both the querulous delicacy of Nono and the gymnastics of Corigliano, the whole governed by the environment-as-instrument approach of the kind demonstrated, as it happens, by the latter composer at his Proms performance last year. These three pieces are nevertheless as different from each other as their titles imply and are expertly and sensitively performed, although the otherwise fine sound is spoilt by some coughing and shuffling in the live recording of the Violin Concerto. Roger Thomas