Pierre Ancelin: Filius Hominis. Rodney Gilfry baritone, Mary Shearer soprano, Jean Topart narrator, Phlippe Lefebvre organ, Chorus Branco Krsmanovitch of Belgrade (Dara Matic-Marovitch), Orchestre National de Lille, Jean-Claude Casadesus. Cybelia CY 853 (1991) barcode 3361800008533
World premiere, recorded 22 March 1989 in the St. Ignatius Church in Rome
Better than I expected
3 September 2024
I didn’t expect much of this CD. I bought it for the label, Cybelia, and because I found it cheap.
Cybelia was a small French label, run by Argentinian-French violinist Eric Alberti and active at the end of the LP days and early CD era, and they were valuable for releasing works by composers (predominantly French) that were (both the works and composers) rarer and more obscure then than now – but many still are: Albert Roussel’s Violin Sonatas, String Trio and seldom recorded First Symphony, chamber music by Arthur Honegger, Florent Schmitt’s Piano Music and ballets Oriane et le Prince d’amour and Antoine et Cléopâtre (conducted by Leif Segerstam), André Jolivet’s Piano Sonatas and String Trio, the works for guitar and the piano music of Henri Sauguet, the complete string quartets of Milhaud, and composers like George Migot, Jean Cras, Charles Koechlin, Paul Le Flem, Roger-Ducasse, Gabriel Dupont, Dynam Victor and Raphaël Fumet, Guy Ropartz, André Caplet, Charles Tournemire… Not all of the early LPs were reissued to CD, regrettably. After the label’s demise some of those recording were reissued by Naxos, and somes others by Integral Classic.
One of their greatest feats was in 1988, with the first-ever publication of Messian’s late opera Saint François d’Assise, with the artistic forces of the creation at the Paris Opera in November 1983 (including Christiane Eda-Pierre, José van Dam, conducted by Seiji Ozwa).
That said, Alberti / Cybelia’s tastes in contemporary music were always very conservative. Other than the rather bizarre Meditation music of Guy Besançon (Cybelia CY 859, link will open new tab to my review), I note, in Cybelia’s catalog (I hope to publish a complete discography very soon), one composer whose works I’d call (and have called, in my review) “avant garde”, the Argentinian-French José Luis Campana (CY 894). Maybe Alberti published Campana’s works because of their shared Argentinian-French origins. Others that, while perhaps not being entirely avant-garde, I certainly wouldn’t characterize as conservative either, were the Romanian/French Marius Constant, and the talented French composer Renaud Gagneux (excerpts from his opera Orphée, CY 865). Other than that, Cybelia’s contemporary music was the American Edmund Pendleton (1899-1987), the French Georges Hugon (1904-1980), Jean Françaix (1912-1997), Marcel Landowski (1915-1999, in particular his opera Montségur, CY 850-851), Roger Calmel (1920-1998), Jacques Bondon (1927-2008), Aubert Lemeland (1932-2010), all part of the conservative streak of French music in second half of the 20th Centuy. Thing are more open with Charles Chaynes (1925-2016, chiefly represented by his opera Noces de Sang – Blood Wedding after the Llorca play, CY 838/839) and André Bon (born 1946 and featured by his opera Le Rapt de Perséphone / The Abduction of Persephone, CY 861).
So, I expected Pierre Ancelin (1934-2001) to be another Aubert Lemeland or Edmund Pendelton. Well, yes and no.
Beginning with unleashed timpani, organ clusters and brassy outbursts, the music is often powerful and menacing. It can be melodic and lyrical and is prone to offer cantilenas to the solo woodwinds when needed, and one passage is a very descriptive, sardonic dance (track 8, The Mocking of Christ), but it doesn’t always rub the listener’s hair in the comfortable direction either, and at times comes close to the organized cacophony one easily associates with “avant-garde” music. Dissonant or consonant, it is always highly expressive.
Filius Hominis is a Passion Play, based on John’s Gospel, with linking texts by French poet Raphaël Cluzel (the adoptive son of composer Henri Sauguet, I discover reading his entry on French Wikipedia).
It is a fitting coincidence that I recently surveyed a number of recordings of Arthur Honegger’s great oratorio La Danse des Morts (his first collaboration with French poet and playright Paul Claudel, soon to be followed by Joan at the Stake). Not that Ancelin’s compositional style in Filius Hominis is an offshoot or derivation of Honegger’s (although, in some passages, there is indeed something reminiscent of Honegger in Ancelin’s music; but generally, Ancelin’s modernism is somewhat more anonymous than Honegger’s music). Yet Filius Hominis reminds me in many ways of La Danse des Morts: an oratorio, with a preponderant role given to a narrator, whose architecture alternates between the powerful-dissonnant and the more lyrical-melodic (at times even plangeant, and with similar solo violin at one point), featuring baritone (predominantly in Filius Hominis) and soprano (she sings only in the last movement of Filius Hominis, “Resurrection”; La Danse des Morts ends with a moving vocalise by soprano; there’s also a mezzo in Honegger’s composition) – oh, and, also: the invocation of the “Son of Man”. It is also fitting that I reviewed one of Frank Martin’s ultimate works, his Requiem, because I am tempted to characterize, stylistically, Ancelin’s Filius Hominis as Honegger’s La Danse des Morts set to music by Martin. This said not to imply that Ancelin’s music is derivative, but to give the reader a sense of what it sounds like. Narrator Jean Topart would have made an excellent narrator in La Danse des Morts (he may be known to polymath music lovers for being the narrator in Jean Martinon’s 1974 recording of Berlioz’ Lelio for EMI). All musical forces seem fully involved.
Major drawback of the CD, though, especially for non-French speaking audiences: liner notes are very succinct (and with an awkward translation to English), and lyrics and translations (narrator delivers in French, singers and chorus in Latin) are not provided. So, especially if you don’t understand the spoken text in French, you very much have to rely on the movements’ titles to know where you are in the Passion. Incidentally, because the oratorio’s commission took place in a context in which various visual artists and writers were also commissioned works on the Passion of Christ, the liner notes are embarassingly over-bloated when they claim that “never in two thousand years had such a commission and confrontation been organized”. Wow, imagine that. And isn’t Pride one of the deadly sins?
Not that it should hamper enjoyment. TT is a very generous 79 minutes.