JEAN-LUC FAFCHAMPS (b.1960): Autoportrait en expire (physionomie du souffle) for String Quartet, Esquif (Khà) for String Quartet and Electronics, Les désordres de Herr Zœbius for String Quartet, Nuages vus du ciel for Quartet at Piano, In memoriam Harry HAlBrEiCH for Solo Violin.

Description: Fascinating, if sometimes (deliberately? Probably) disorienting stuff; pianist-composer Fafchamps, a long-time fixture on the European contemporary music scene in both rôles, seems to enjoy being deliberately misleading about what he’s up to in his music; the effect is rather like reading the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, in which you think you know where the narrative is going before suddenly the rug is pulled out from under your feet when you realise that there was something altogether different going on the whole time. Fafchamps even echoes this in his programme notes, long, detailed essays that seem designed to mislead rather than to inform. One of his favourite feints is to begin a piece with a kind of ambiguous uncertainty and then reveal its more concrete, and more tonal and accessible, content after a while. Thus Autoportrait en expirs (physionomie du souffle), which is exactly what it says it is; it begins with gasping, ragged breathing effects, even incorporating noise textures, but after a while it emerges that these are just descriptions of the type of breathing that would accompany certain activities, like the fast breathlessness during a rapid burst of violin activity, or the slow, drowsy breathing that accompanies what could be the protagonist slumbering, and sometimes dreaming (and maybe dying, as the breathing shallows, slows, and finally stops?) - bowed conventionally and rather tonal and Romantic in effect. Esquif (Lettre Soufie: Khà’) is apparently part of a large ongoing cycle of 28 pieces "freely inspired by symbolic boards developed within Sufi mysticism.” The quartet attempts to assert itself through insistent melodic fragments and furious protest against the mournful, Stygian flow of electronic sounds. After an extended passage whispering its way through "caverns measureless to man" it succeeds in asserting itself in a robust piece of tonal minimalism, which provokes the electronics to a climactic effort to overwhelm it. Finally the two flow into one another, numbly consonant, the quartet apparently willingly subsumed by the electronics' waters of Lethe. Of Les Désordres de Herr Zœbius, a 25-minute string quartet, the composer even admits to "the self-mockery of the titles evoking a hypothetical investigation from science-fiction" and warns "Any reader who is deeply averse to the sciences and to mathematics had best avoid the present paragraph", before embarking on a profoundly unhelpful précis of James Gleick's 1987 book "Chaos: Making a New Science". The first movement ruinously deconstructs the last movement of Beethoven’s 14th quartet as "A violent exorcism of [the composer’s] doubts in the face of a form as respectable as the string quartet". The second synthesises a coherent passage of neo-romantic quartet music from the apparently random interaction of chaotic fragments presented at the outset. The third does the opposite, summoning chaos out of order, in an analogy of what can happen when certain values are inserted into some mathematical functions. Calm, coherent sections are contradicted by erratic note-swarms. Chant magnétique is strangely beautiful, spinning an endless, microtonally inflected, somewhat Eastern melismatic melody against a consonant, harmonically stable background, producible a "seemingly ethnic result [that] in fact refers to no known traditional culture." Nuages is an ethereal sonoristic sketch, featuring the composer making an Hitchcockian cameo on his own record, playing an electric piano set to a glockenspiel stop in lieu of the prepared piano and celesta originally specified, and Fafchamps' tribute to his former teacher exhaustively (exhaustingly?) explores every possible permutation of a musical cryptogram of Halbreich's name, in the style of a Baroque violin piece. Quatror MP4.