![]() Dutilleux was greatly enamoured of vocalists, especially the jazz singer Sarah Vaughan and the great French chanson singers. He often calls for Ray Robinson-style cup mutes in the brass section, which seems to indicate the influence of big band music. While he always paid attention to developments in contemporary music and incorporated some serialist techniques into his work, he also criticized the more radical and intolerant aspects of the movement: "What I reject is the dogma and the authoritarianism which manifested themselves in that period." Dutilleux refused to be associated with any school.ĭutilleux's music contains distant echoes of jazz, as can be heard in the plucked double bass strings at the beginning of his First Symphony and his frequent use of syncopated rhythms. His attitude toward serialism was ambiguous. Among his favourite pieces, he mentioned Beethoven's late string quartets and Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande. Influences and styleĭutilleux's music extends the legacies of French composers such as Debussy and Ravel but is also clearly influenced by Béla Bartók and Igor Stravinsky. His tombstone is made of grey granite and bears the epitaph "Compositeur". He died on in Paris, aged 97, and was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery, in the same grave as Geneviève, his wife who died in 2009. Invited by Walter Fink, in 2006 he was the 16th composer featured in the Rheingau Musik Festival's annual Komponistenporträt.įor many years, Dutilleux had a studio on Île Saint-Louis. His students included Gérard Grisey, Francis Bayer, Alain Gagnon, Jacques Hétu, and Kenneth Hesketh. He was appointed to the staff of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in 1970 and was composer-in-residence at Tanglewood in 19. He served as Professor of Composition at the École Normale de Musique de Paris from 1961 to 1970. In 1942, he conducted the choir of the Paris Opera.ĭutilleux worked as Head of Music Production for Radio France from 1945 to 1963. He worked for a year as a medical orderly in the army and returned to Paris in 1940, where he worked as a pianist, arranger and music teacher. He also taught at the École Normale de Musique de Paris and at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique, and was twice composer in residence at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Massachusetts.ĭutilleux won the Prix de Rome in 1938 for his cantata L'anneau du roi but did not complete his entire residency in Rome due to the outbreak of World War II. ![]() In addition to composing, he worked as the Head of Music Production for Radio France for 18 years. … But his voice, marked by sensuously handled harmony and color, was his own."ĭutilleux received several major prizes throughout his career, notably the Grand Prix de Rome (1938), International Music Council's International Rostrum of Composers (1955), the Grand-Croix de la Légion d'honneur (2004), the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize (2005), the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society (2008) and the Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music (2011). Between Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez in age, he was little affected by either, though he took an interest in their work. Dutilleux’s position in French music was proudly solitary. In the New York Times, Paul Griffiths wrote, "Mr. French organist Gaston Litaize also asked Dutilleux many times to compose for the organ, but nothing came from it the two first met in 1938 at the Grand Prix de Rome, which Dutilleux won and at which Litaize finished second. Works were commissioned from him by such major artists as Charles Munch, George Szell, Mstislav Rostropovich, the Juilliard String Quartet, Isaac Stern, Paul Sacher, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Simon Rattle, Renée Fleming, and Seiji Ozawa. Some of these are regarded as masterpieces of 20th-century classical music. ![]() Some of his notable compositions include a piano sonata, two symphonies, the cello concerto Tout un monde lointain… ( A whole distant world), the violin concerto L'arbre des songes ( The tree of dreams), the string quartet Ainsi la nuit ( Thus the night) and a sonatine for flute and piano. His small body of published work, which garnered international acclaim, followed in the tradition of Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Albert Roussel and Olivier Messiaen, but in an idiosyncratic style. Henri Dutilleux ( 22 January 1916 – ) was a French composer active mainly in the second half of the 20th century.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |