The Shadows of Time

Les heures (The hours)

Ariel maléfique (Evil Ariel)

Mémoire des ombres (Memory of the shadows)

- Interlude -

Vagues de lumière (Waves of light)

Dominante bleue? (Blue dominant?)

Henri Dutilleux likes an element of mystery in his music. Even his titles are chosen with mysterious intent - Tout un monde lointain (A whole distant world), L’arbre des songes (The tree of dreams), Mystère de l’instant (Mystery of the instant), to name but three. The idea is to communicate some hint of the inspiration behind the work without giving anything away in specific terms. The Shadows of time is no exception, except that it is in English in acknowledgement of the American orchestra that commissioned it. It carries several possible meanings, the most likely of which is the passage of time and the shadows of memory that fall across it. The memories are not, it seems, of the happiest and the conclusion reached in the last movement (enigmatically entitled Dominante bleue?) is uncertain.

One certain fact is that The Shadows of Times was written between 1993 and 1997 for Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra - which for Dutilleux, who admires the conductor no less than the orchestra, was a challenge and an inspiration in itself. It took some time for his ideas to take shape but the virtuosity of the ensemble was always a powerful stimulus. Although the music acquired deeper reverberations during the course of composition, it would not be doing the finished work a serious injustice to think of it as a concerto for orchestra - an aspect of the score which is particularly apparent in the first two movements.

The dramatic opening gesture, however - a chromatic descending phrase emphatically asserted by blazing trumpets and fiercely plucked strings - is of more than merely colouristic significance, as later events will confirm. Les Heures itself begins after that brief introduction: a temple block marks the march of time in even crotchets and woodwind intone what might be described as its main theme. Its most spectacular aspect, on the other hand, is the virtuoso treatment of the brass, particularly the trumpets, who sustain a high level activity while the hours tick by on marimba and harp. The opening gesture returns in varied form towards the end of the movement.

The second movement is a short demonic scherzo featuring first multi-divided strings and then woodwind, not least a wicked E-flat clarinet that enters with a grotesque upward glissando on a Chinese gong. As for the title Ariel maléfique, it has been suggested that it refers not to

Shakespeare’s airy spirit but to the rebel angel in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Perhaps it is a memory of the years between the wars when, in the composer’s words, “we were still experiencing the consequences of the first world war and Hitler was making his presence felt.”

That interpretation seems to be borne out by what we know of the third movement Mémoire des ombres, which bears a dedication to “Anne Frank and for all the children of the world, the innocents (1945-1995).” Dutilleux was working on it during the fiftieth anniversary of the Liberation when, he said in an interview in Le Monde, “many memories came back to me. Near my studio, on the île Saint-Louis in Paris, there is a school playground. The screaming of the children and these memories of the war merged in my mind. I thought of the children of Izieu [the orphanage from which Klaus Barbie sent 44 Jewish children to their death at Auschwitz] and Anne Frank. Hence the short text, ‘Pourquoi nous, pourquoi l’étoile‘ (Why us, why the star?) sung by three children’s voices.” Beginning with one solitary voice and what seems to be a Gregorian melody in woodwind the movement climaxes in a ferocious recall and development of the opening gesture, the violent message of which is confirmed by a stroke of the whip and bestial rumblings among the lowest instruments of the orchestra. But even the double basses, divided into five separate parts at one point, and timpani aspire towards the light.

Before the light is revealed there is a short Interlude, a quiet reflection on the repeated notes associated with the passage of time (on woodwind and percussion) mingled with distant memories of earlier events (on violins). Vagues de lumière is a brilliant display of woodwind colours starting in the lower and the middle registers and, in two distinct waves, reaching ever higher pitches in ever more refulgently sparkling articulation. The violence of the opening gesture intervenes here too, however, causing the pitch to plunge down again towards two resounding pizzicato thumps on lower strings.

“I suspect,” Dutilleux has said, “that man has not improved his situation on earth as much as he thinks, in spite of a few important exceptions.” Even so the composer does not conclude what might well be his last major work - he is now in his mid-eighties - in pessimism. The last movement Dominante bleue? is a question mark, a contemplation on sustained melodic lines, featuring a particularly eloquent trumpet and a no less expressive trombone. If, when the rhythmic activity increases, there is more light than dark to be heard, only one thing is certain - which is that time, its ticking represented here by a variety of percussion instruments together with harp and woodwind, goes on in the same unchanging tempo.

The Shadows of Time was first performed in Boston by Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in October 1997 and its first British performance was given by Yan Pascal Tortelier and the BBC Philharmonic at the BBC Proms in July 1998.