PHILIPPE MANOURY (b.1952): Fragments pour une portrait for Ensemble, Partita I for Viola and Live Electronics.

Description: Fragments, the title suggesting the multiple portraits of a single subject, and similar titles of the painter Francis Bacon, is an impressive and inventive series of seven pieces of distinct character, evoking the large-scale works of Stockhausen (especially Gruppen, which Manoury regards as pre-eminent among 20th-century compositions) and leading back to the most notorious example of dynamically driven, scream-ridden orchestral catharsis of a century ago, Stravinsky's Le sacre (through gestures that are almost but not quite quotations). Partita I continues Manoury's extended involvement in electroacoustic composition at IRCAM, with complex textures produced by the computer in direct response to the precise way in which the performer executes certain figurations or attacks; in other words rather than passively transforming sounds that have already been produced, the computer is effectively played by the performer as an extension of the actual instrument, in this case a viola. Christophe Desjardins (viola), Ensemble intercontemporain; Susanna Mälkki.