Thomas Wally — Jusqu'à l'aurore (Col Legno)
There is no categorizing Austrian composer Thomas Wally’s chamber music except in the broadest terms. That’s a cop-out, of course, but even repeated exposure to the mutations, skewed reiterations, bait-and-switch juxtapositions and occasional but poignant moments of stasis Wally dishes up leads away from facile description. If the antics of John Zorn form a point of reference, Wally’s music makes the comparison seem shallow.
Take the first of the four transfigurations, as good a place to start as any. Clusters scurry, ascending, only for a sudden halt to give way to a string tone of overwhelming beauty and transparency which then expands, facilitating a return of sorts. It’s clear though that everything has actually been leading up to the muted sonorities ten seconds in, conjuring shades of early Second Viennese School orchestration while never succumbing to their sterner implications. Swell, tremolo, timbral changes and the scaling of registral heights and depths continue throughout the brief but rapturous trip, a faster ride than any John Adams would have imagined.
The rest of the disc tells an equally inclusive but somewhat different tale, which can be summarized by the titular piano quartet. It is the fourth in a series of caprices, one of two interlocking series filling the disc, and whatever whimsy underpins the miniature’s breathless flux involves the eschewing of cadence. As so often happens with music of such intensity and scope, moments must substitute for the whole where description is concerned. The first thirty seconds embody an absolutely staggering array of half-formed reference in the service of phrase, foil and out-right disruption as Wally plunges into waters redolent of everything from Bartok to the Romantic schmaltz (should I recognize it?) at 0:25 or those sonorities at 2:21, immediately dispelled with a descending sneer. Like Ligeti and Penderecki, tone and timbre merge and melt, swapping identities in a way that should have been exhausted in the 1970s but that emerges with unexpected freshness. There is no consistency to phrase length or attendant dynamic import, though both are executed with the flawless precision and emotional investment only the finest musicians can muster. Registral and technical extremity is nothing to these complete musicians even as, like Mahler before him, Wally continually ushers the music toward silence only for it to rise from its own ashes, whether in the branching out of a single pitch or from some unglimpsed cavernous depth. Listen to those ascending and arpeggiated things that aren’t quite unisons near the two-minute mark, and then listen again, because anything closer to technical and expressive perfection comes along infrequently. It could be, for this piece especially, that Mahler is the closest point of comparison, given those gorgeously extended passages of hushed sonority floating along as in the fourth movement of Mahler’s last completed symphony.
In his contribution to the booklet, fellow musician and academic Dieter Ammann writes of the Mondrian Ensemble: “Composition and interpretation are two sides of the same coin. Every composer could count her or himself lucky if that other side of the coin shone as brightly as it does here.” He speaks truth; there is a disconcerting but thrilling sense of kinship in which ensemble and composition are so inextricably linked as to negate even interpretations that haven’t happened yet. This kind of artistic bond is exactly what Wally’s work needs. As he explains in the same booklet, his music veers between a need for freedom and a desire to attain perfection and not always in ways the ear of the behearer might dictate. The final work on the disc is the absolutely exquisite “Postscriptum (2 × 11 × 12): The Melancholy of Perfection(ism,” a solo piano work that Tamriko Kordzaia plays with all the requisite mystery and precision. Listening to her bringing Wally’s work to life might again belie the composer’s allegiance to early Schoenberg or to the introductions to certain Scriabin sonatas, maybe even to influences as disparate as Debussy and the ethereal improvising pianist Richard Grossman, but none is inclusive enough to elucidate the universes at these musicians’ disposal. Each member of the ensemble renders technical concerns superfluous, so thorough are their groundings in history and interpretation, and such is the group’s comfort level with whatever Wally commits to paper. As with everything Col Legno releases, production and documentation are superb.
Marc Medwin