Henri Dutilleux Retrospective

Many well-known 20th Century musicians worked with composer Henri Dutilleux and commissioned works from him: Paul Sacher, Mstislav Rostropovich, Daniel Barenboim, Dawn Upshaw, Seiji Ozawa, Jukka-Pekka Saraste.

The sixteen-year-old Henri Dutilleux came from his native Angers to study at the Paris Conservatoire in 1932. …. After winning the Prix de Rome in 1938, he worked in Paris throughout the German Occupation as chorus master at the Opéra and as a producer for French Radio. He later disowned most of what he composed at this time, and regarded his opus 1 as being the Piano Sonata written for his new wife Geneviève Joy, who gave its first performance in 1948.

While regretting that the great tradition of the mélodie seemed to have ended with Poulenc, Dutilleux added only sparingly to this repertoire. His constant searching for new ideas led him in 1989 to turn his back on the “croissance progressive” that had served him well for some forty years. … But the “progressive” technique reappeared in The Shadows of Time (1997), written for Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where Proustian ideas of memory are engaged in a deeply moving tribute to Anne Frank and other victims of the Holocaust.

Dutilleux said: “As for the spirit of the work, I can say that from time to time slightly veiled allusions slip in … to past events … like fugitive images … here the colour of children’s voices, there traces of Gregorian chant or the outline of a chorale. Everything refers to a central idea … that of space/time. One could call it ‘the march of time’.”