For Flute, Clarinet, Violin, Cello and Piano
Commissioned by Musiques Obliques ensemble
Premiere in the Auditorium of musée Grñevin on 11th June 1991.
Duration: 13 minutes
It is the oldest of the works in the Urbana cycle. I have decided a posteriori to include it because it is the founding work that led me to think the sonorous space in a different way, and also because it is located at the beginning of the questioning that carried me to imagine the suitability between the poetic and the musical material that I have always wanted to experiment in the composition.
The inclusion of Más allá del rojo in the Urbana cycle sets a milestone in the organologic order in the evident relation that it has with regards to the other chamber pieces of the cycle. Beginning the cycle with a XX century classic formation was a beautiful way of leaving it behind.
“Pierrot Lunaire”, a text made for this formation posed all the challenges: as well as Schönberg’s work, “Treize couleurs du soleil couchant” by Tristan Murail (work in which I took part as an interpreter in the eighties when I worked for Ensemble Itinéraire), and, of course, “Talea” by Gérard Grisey.
In this first “sketch” of the space, I dealt with the notions of trajectory and limit as essential components of writing. Naturally, and after years of maturating, to understand the profound meaning of the venture that would take me to the birth of the very Urbana cycle.
Two main themes are implicit in the title of the piece: on the one hand, red in all of its possible meanings, and on the other hand, the work it takes to cross the limit, the final frontier.
To summarise, I would say that the limit set by the color red makes us change our state. The word “red” suggests that other states have also been engines in the composition: mobility, violence, passion, lyricism and poetry, emotion and what is vivid, limits and their transgression.
The quintet is articulated in three movements reunited by a community of materials exposed and developed differently.
Opposition and complement principles are the axis on which I used as basis for the construction of a univocal music material. These principles are present throughout the whole work. The different emotional stages of limits transgressions appear in a very different way: for example, the contrast that rules the construction of the first movement is built from the first beat by the shape of a direct matter (register and rhythmic opposition). This friction opposition area is notoriously stretched in the second movement by turning into a jagged and colored matter. Its change of state is achieved by accumulations that cause a register and matter explosion.
The third movement is governed by the notion of “falling on the other side” of the overpassed limit and the appearance in a different world that is in line with the previous one. The general construction of the piece has not been framed inside a particular system nor inside a determined aesthetic; on the contrary, as suggested by the title, its dramatic articulationobeys a purely musical order of ideas.
Au delà du rouge I
Au delà du rouge II
Au delà du rouge III
Au delà du rouge
Chapelle Auguste Perret Arcueil, Concert Public 1993.
Gilles Burgos, flûte, Philippe Berrod, clarinette, Patrick Févai, violon, David Simpson, violoncelle et Gérard Frémy, piano.
Laurent Cuniot, Direction
