Laurent Pernice
Antigone
ITALY ADN RECORDS DNN039C (2024)
Instrumental music from this Marseilles composer, musician and deep thinker, mostly played on acoustic stringed instruments by himself (with some electronic treatments), but also showcasing the excellent viola work of Violaine Sultan, who he recruited from the teaching faculty of the Marseilles Conservatory of Music.
Pernice composed this work for a stage play, a contemporary version spoken in French, of the Sophocles tragedy staged by Emma Gustafsson and Laurent Hatat; what we have today isn’t a “soundtrack” to the play exactly, but rather an assemblage of all the music he composed for the production – hence the subtitle “Complete Sessions”. Six actors from Antigone are also credited on the CD, although we don’t hear much from their declaiming voices on the disc apart from a brief exposition on ‘Stasimon 1’; they are also represented by the rather washed-out ghostly images printed on the digipak. The 20 tracks indicate how closely Pernice adhered to the story and structure of the play; they read like episode titles. Interestingly, I see the original tragedy (with which I am not familiar) touches on themes of citizenship and obedience, and how society’s constraints conflict with the individual’s sense of “self”, along with the expected subtexts about families, conflicts, and familial duties (some say that all Greek tragedy is really about the family).
The response of Laurent Pernice to all this textual richness has been to create rather solemn, minimal, and poised music; some of it quite classical in its harmonic approach; all of it conveying deep melancholy and a sense of futility. There’s isn’t a great deal of departure from the central sadness underpinning everything, although the Nyman-like structure of ‘La Lutte’ goes some way to enliven the mood. A bit of me was half-expecting simple “atmospheric” tones to act as a backdrop for the actors, but no – each piece, no matter how short (some are delicate miniatures lasting for just over one minute), has been thought-through in detail, never drifting away into the land of wisps and ghosts, nor filling space with unnecessary padding. We’re intrigued by Pernice ever since we learned of his association with Palo Alto, a French combo seemingly determined to keep the Zeuhl flame burning and extend their complex music into sci-fi and philosophical areas; we enjoyed their album Difference and Repetition: A Musical Evocation of Gilles Deleuze from 2021.
With this record and the Martin Küchen / Angles Kalypso jazz opera, and to some extent the recent jazz LP Medea by Star Splitter, perhaps we’re seeing an emerging rediscovery of the enduring power of Greek tragedy. (22/04/2024)