{"id":797,"date":"2008-12-03T17:06:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-03T17:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/wordpress\/?p=797"},"modified":"2010-01-09T16:42:34","modified_gmt":"2010-01-09T16:42:34","slug":"a-brief-reflection-on-crossing-the-threshhold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/2008\/12\/a-brief-reflection-on-crossing-the-threshhold.html","title":{"rendered":"A brief reflection on crossing the threshhold"},"content":{"rendered":"
I haven’t been getting out as much as I’d like to lately, but I did make it to the Philharmonia Orchestra’s (free!) performance of G\u00e9rard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil<\/a> on Sunday evening. Frankly, it’s mind-boggling that we didn’t have to pay to hear something as extraordinary as this music.<\/div>\n
The cycle of songs was Grisey’s last completed work, before his sudden death in 1998. Over ten years after the completion of his remarkable Les espaces acoustiques<\/span><\/a>, his abilities in creating and balancing new sounds had deepened in skill and sensitivity. My reservations about his reliance on dramatic gestures in his earlier work did not apply: this meditation on death hovered like a final breath, both frail and terrible, suspending time and revealing the profound emotional depths of which music is capable.<\/div>\n
Nothing felt forced, everything felt natural yet utterly strange; every development in the music was unexpected yet inevitable.<\/div>\n
By a fortunate coincidence, Inconstant Sol has recently posted a recording of the complete work<\/a>, taken from a performance in Paris earlier this year – having earlier given us a complete Les espaces acoustiques<\/span><\/a>. The Quatre chants<\/span> are well worth a punt on your bandwidth.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I haven’t been getting out as much as I’d like to lately, but I did make it to the Philharmonia Orchestra’s (free!) performance of G\u00e9rard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil on Sunday evening. Frankly, it’s mind-boggling that we didn’t have to pay to hear something as extraordinary as this music. The cycle of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=797"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3416,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797\/revisions\/3416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}