Edison Denissow

Signes en blanc

'Signes en blanc' (Signs in White) bears a superscription of two lines from Marcel Schwob's 'Le Livre de Monelle': 'Et le royaume parut, mais il était muré de blancheur.' (And the kingdom appeared, but it was walled in whiteness.) It is a fantastic evocation damped in the top register of the piano, moving between quadruple piano and mezzo forte with a brief one-measure forte just before the final arabesques, which is somewhat reminiscent of the conclusion of Stockhausen's 'Klavierstück IX'. The length of the resonances of the chords demanded by the composer creates a contemporary atmosphere that has no equivalent except in Messiaen. And, finally, the title, 'Signes en blanc' inevitably contrasts with Debussy's 'En blanc et noir' (In White and Black).

But the predominant feature of this musical drawing - all in drypoint and delicate, with winged lines, 'as fast as possible', the composer says, whose pictorial counterpart one can find in Henri Michaux - is an entirely original and particular atmosphere in which the notes shimmer like stars and the resonances carry the muted echoes of sad, barely sketched melodies. This abstract work remains profoundly Slav in its color, its phantasmagoria and its irreal chords liberated from the expressionist weight of a Scriabin as well as the linking thread with tonality cut.
(Jean-Pierre Armengaud)