José Luis Campana: My (Patrice Bocquillon, flute & percussion, Dominique My, piano, voice & percussion). Imago for 16-part chorus and magnetic tape (Atelier des Choeurs de Radio France, Guy Reibel). Quatuor à cordes No. 2 (Auryn Quartett). Cybelia CY 894 (1992) barcode 3361800008946
Recorded 17 May 1985 (Imago), 18 October 1987 at the Donaueschingen Festival (String Quartet No. 2), 14 June 1989 at Studio 106 of Radio France, Paris (My)
Imaginative and Ear-catching Avant-garde
Originally posted on Amazon.com, 13 February 2012
Even among the small niche of the French avant-garde, José Luis Campana (born Argentinian in 1949 but established in Paris since 1975 and a student there of Ivo Malec, Betsy Jolas, Pierre Schaeffer and Guy Reibel) isn’t among the most recognized and prominent, and I probably wouldn’t have bought this disc, if it hadn’t been out of an interest for the label. Cybelia, a small French label operated by the violinist Eric Alberti, was active between the late LP days and the early 1990s. In its relatively short existence and among its relatively small catalog the label published some interesting stuff, sometimes more on account of the repertoire rarity than because of its musical quality, but still: like, the premiere recording of Roussel’s First Symphony, the first complete cycle of Milhaud’s String Quartets, the Quintet of Paul Le Flem and those of Charles Koechlin, the cello sonatas of Guy Ropartz, piano music of Florent Schmitt, Henry Sauguet, Georges Migot and Gabriel Dupont, rare orchestral music of Schmitt and Koechlin, contemporary operas of Marcel Landowski, Charles Chaynes, Renaud Gagneux, and, of course, the recording of the Paris Opera world premiere of Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise under Ozawa (Cybelia CY833/6). Not so bad for a small label. Those examples show that the bulk of their catalog was devoted to French music of the late 19th Century and 20th-century traditionalists. The Campana CD was one of their rare forays into really avant-garde music, and it was on sale cheap, so I decided to give it a try, not expecting much of it, something like dry and noisy “avant-garde” music without the sonic imagination and dramatic impact that make great avant-garde music.
In fact I enjoyed it extremely, and found that, at its best, it had exactly that: the sonic imagination and dramatic impact that make the great avant-garde music. The three compositions collated on the disc date from 1985 (Imago for 16-part A Capella Chorus), 1986 (My for flute, piano, percussion, voice and two instrumental players) and 1987 (2nd String Quartet), and each runs circa 20-minutes.
My starts in a bang, with explosive percussive piano and various other percussion noises. It employs a full array of contemporary performing techniques especially with the flute, uses the piano not for melody but for color (often in the high, tinker-bell registers) and clusters of sounds, and its architecture and logic are more difficult to grasp than a traditional sonata-form. I’m not even sure there is a pre-defined architecture, when reading the liner notes’ explanation that “the work’s structure can be defined as a succession of sonic events transcribed as they presented themselves in their initial conception. Important developments were deliberately avoided in order for those events or sonic objects to remain identical to themselves”. But within its options it is sonically imaginative, with always something new catching the ear. Nothing possessive in the piece’s title, it was written for and premiered by the two performers who play it here, flautist Patrice Bocquillon and pianist Dominique My (that’s a she), who gives it the title. They play not only their own instruments but also percussion (I’m not sure what instrument enters softly at 18:41, harmonium, accordion or electric organ) and My (Dominique, I mean) sings. She’s a stupendous performer, not only an accomplished pianist but a trained soprano, and Campana’s writing for the voice doesn’t just call for grumbles and groans and moans and whistling like most (all?) contemporary pieces using performers’ vocals, but real (wordless) singing: just listen to the end, at 17:30. Campana’s melodic writing for the voice, accompanied by sparse percussion, caressing basso flute or apparently computer-processsed resonance, are mysterious, ritual-like, oriental-sounding, beautiful. Flautists with a mind set on daring explorations are strongly advised to look at My (and to put on ads for a pianist equally skilled as a soprano).
Imago for A Cappella Chorus is equally impressive. It uses electronic sounds and processing much more conspicuously than My, starting with frightening sounds evoking some monster from the abyss. The compositions’ theme is intriguing. Campana was also trained as a clinical psychologist, and Imago sets out to depict a session of group therapy. When you think of it, it is in fact an ideal subject for contemporary choral writing in the wake of Berio, Nono and Ligeti (and I’ll let you figure out if this is meant seriously or tongue-in-cheek). It enables Campana to write a fine piece of contemporary music-theatre, using here again the full array of vocal techniques developed by and after the composers just mentioned: besides singing, cries, shouts, whispering, glissandi, amplified laughs, words, onomatopoeia, mixing them with electronic sounds. The result is, again, imaginative, ear-catching and dramatic. Campana also has a sense of humor. I enjoyed particularly the obsessively repeated line “I’m someone I’m someone I’m someone I’m someone I’m someone I’m someone I’m nobody” (maybe we should all take Group therapy to be so able to finally face the hard truth), and this one: “do you really need a theme”? This is the recording of the premiere, and the performers sound exceptionally good and invested.
The Second String Quartet is a tougher nut – avant-garde still, again going for the eerie sounds rather than for seductive melody, but either because it is in the nature of the medium, or (rather) because of Campana’s less imaginative use of its tonal possibilities (with no electronics here), the quartet sounds full of unrelenting, exacerbated, ear-piercing tension, assuaged by no moment of truly mesmerizing tonal invention.
Still, two out of three is a pretty good average for contemporary creation and makes the CD a worthwile acquisition for those with a taste for that kind of music.
TT 63:21, the liner notes’ English translation is inept. “The work’s structure can be defined as a succession of sonic events transcribed as they presented themselves in their initial conception” becomes “the work structure is defined by initial conception transcribed into a sequence of sound events”.