Ensemble Dedalus / Ryoko Akama, Eliane Radigue, France, Montaigne Noire, MN 7 CD (2023)
Now in her 90s, Éliane Radigue has had a career spanning nearly 70 years in composing and performing music since initially studying piano and then going on to become a student of Pierre Schaeffer in the 1950s and then working with Pierre Henry in the 1960s. Not surprisingly perhaps, Radigue’s own music has gone through various phases, even blocks, in which she appears to have broken off performing with musique concrète principles to compose and perform with synthesisers, and then from the year 2001 onwards, composing and performing with acoustic instruments. Yet as this release, combining and contrasting a piece performed with acoustic instruments by Ensemble Dedalus with a piece performed on analog synthesiser and sine wave generator by Ryoko Akama, demonstrates, there is actually much commonality across Radigue’s corpus of work. The two pieces featured on this album come from Radigue’s Occam series, both written within a four or five-year period (2014 to 2018).
Akama’s performance of “Occam XX” is a mostly serene meditative drone work that does not really change much throughout its 30-minute length: the changes in music and mood come seemingly in the background around the drone itself. There is more activity around the drone and behind it past the 15-minute mark. Most listeners will probably find it very monotonous and, apart from its potential as music for meditation and relaxation to open up one’s mind and consciousness, rather limited in what it can do for them otherwise.
Ensemble Dedalus’s performance of “Occam Hepta I” is a grander affair, seemingly with more richness and depth than Akama’s performance, conveying a sense of anticipation and expectation of something wondrous and extraordinary about to arrive or happen. The piece starts with and, for its first half at least, is dominated by strings (cello, viola, violin) to be joined later by sonorous brass instruments (trombone, trumpet, saxophone). Again, this is a very serene work, in its own way compelling you to concentrate on its details and eventually to find mental and spiritual expansion and awareness in its depths as it sails on its way.
This is one of those recordings where perhaps watching the artists perform the various pieces might be of more value than just listening to them, because the process of composition and performance (and the ability to observe the process) may be as important to an audience as actually hearing the results. Through seeing Radigue’s compositions being performed, audiences will come to realise that, no matter who is performing them or how they are performed, these pieces share a vision and a set of musical and perhaps spiritual principles in common.