Output details

Danel, Marc. Fafchamps:Les Désordres De Herr Zoebius Pour Quatuor À Cordes, Bryce Pour Clarinette Et Quatuor À Cordes (with Jean-Michael Charlier). Fuga Libera FUG537 [2008].

The disc is one of a series of collaborations between the Quatuor Danel and living Belgian composers, enabled by the Belgian government’s financial sponsorship of the Quartet between 1997 and 2007. Jean-Luc Fafchamps’s 26-minute string quartet Les désordres de Herr Zachias, composed over a twelve-year period from 1992-2003, is an investigation into chaos theory as applied to music. As such it first and foremost expects from the musicians a complete mastery of an array of contemporary linguistic elements (rhythmic, poly-metrical, sonoristic and microtonal). But it also demands the realization of ‘impossible’ elements, such as combinations of dynamics and special effects determined by mathematical processes without regard for instrumental or human configuration. In addition the finale, ‘Chant magnétique’, asks for an improvised ‘denaturing’ of the instruments, with a view to a kind of Arabian-Western contemporary fusion, in line with the composer’s fantasmagoric-intellectual programmatic scenario. These elements were worked out in close collaboration with the composer, in public lecture-recital presentations as well as in the final studio recording. The clarinet quintet Bryce (1998), inspired by the sight of an eagle over Bryce Canyon in Utah, casts the quartet as equal and sometimes superior partners with the clarinet. Here the research element, again worked out in the composer’s presence, consisted largely of determining the unorthodox roles of the instruments in relation to one another. The works were recorded in a closed-studio (non-public) session at Ecaussines, Chateau de la Follie in 2005. The CD, released in 2008, was the first public dissemination of the recordings.