In the summer of 2007, Fernando Corona completed a site-specific commission for Les Grandes Eaux Nocturnes, an annual festival of sound, light and water at Versailles. He composed a suite of music for an evening's fountain display in King Louis's garden. Very French.
Being there must have been utterly mind-blowing.
THE VERSAILLES SESSIONS is the recorded version - a beautifully realised mash-up of baroque instruments and a mezzo-soprano on a huge scale, processed through the mercurial refractions and tilted perspectives of a very accomplished and experienced electronic composer/musician.
Much of what we can hear in the CD is almost familiar. But the scale and the genius of the work is that nothing is recognisable. Composed work by Lully, Couperin and others was played. and then reshaped, giantised, sent to the depths of dark skies and brought back in flames and steel, with whispered trails of silk and 48,000 KHz cicadas.
Emotionally the result is strong and immediate. The technicalities of how, or on what, the pieces were constructed don't really matter. Take deep breaths and let the album howl around your ears in as large a space and at as loud a volume as you can arrange. It's sensational in all the ways a massive occasion demands. Not that it sounds like Handel, but there's something heroic here that reminds me of his big outdoor gigs with "Music For The Royal Fireworks" and so on (accidental conflagrations included).
The album opens ("Welcome To Versailles") with an air raid from space that reminds us how monstrously large the tiny spaces in our bodily molecules can be. There are fanfares and drones too, sweeping up centuries and continents of allusion. Cosmic is the word. I suspect that listening while stoned could be overdoing it.
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The scary echoes of "Louis XIV's Demons" are more personal, if a tyrant of such grotesquery can be called such. It's more "le roi solei as Edward Scissorhands". There is lots of metallic echo, conjured (perhaps) from the viola da gamba. An abyss opens, and a fragile moment of peace ends it before the more serene beginning of "A Lesson For The Future, Farewell To The Old Ways".
In "Death Of A Forest" the human voice asserts itself as beauty in a threatened organic space. It sounds both haunting and moving. It's followed by the twelve minute epic of "Spring In The Artificial Gardens" that spins out some of the surprising textures and ululations of processed instrumental sounds in a nearly-optimistic flow of heartbeat tempo. The dance actually starts with the opening of "Lully's "Turquerie" As Interpreted By An Advanced Script". Children in peasant dress seem to skip around the base rivets of cheerfully monstrous robots, advancing in mechanical waves like beings from the Island of Laputa. It's comical and beautiful and it soothes the terrors that have sneaked in at moments throughout the work's wonderful 50 minute duration.
www.last.fm/music/Murcof
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