La Barque mystique (“The Mystical Boat”) takes its name from a series of paintings by another symbolist of the turn of the twentieth century: Odilon Redon. Though they vary, particularly in use of colour, Redon’s paintings each depict a single sailboat afloat on the sea. Murail has pointed to several features that interest him in the works and which he seeks to explore in his music: combinations of seemingly incompatible colours, the contrast between vague, foggy expanses of colour and incisive strokes. As such, although there are passages that recall the ebb and flow of waves and the eddies of underwater currents, this is not overtly descriptive music.

 

The piece was commissioned by Maria Hahnloser, whose name infuses the music. Murail transformed the nine characters of her name into a string of values which then dictate elements of the music on both the local and large-scale level. The opening flourish in the flute, for example, outlines this pattern transposed into pitches; meanwhile, the form of the work is cast in nine sections, which transpose these values into the durations governing the length of each section. Each of these sections explores different ‘spectral’ techniques: like in Saariaho’s works, although this is purely instrumental music, the legacy of Murail’s extensive scientific research and electro-acoustic composition is clear.

 

Murail thus describes the work as operating with the precision of a mechanical watch, but despite the complex background structure, these features are often more evident analytically than aurally. The nine sections of the work, for example, are obscured by Murail’s delight in bridging them with overlapping transitions. For the listener, it is perhaps easier to follow a fast-slow-fast-slow-fast form, with the slow sections characterised by sustained chords, orchestrated with shifting timbres between instruments, separated by silences. The piece then concludes with a coda heralded by a series of chords recalling a bell. This is a favourite sonority of Murail’s, which he transposes to the ensemble through the particularly delectable combination of muted piano, pizzicato strings, and tongue rams in the flute.

​

Joshua Ballance