Labyrinthe de Minotaur

Alain Bancquart
Le Livre du Labyrinthe (1995-2000)
Mode 120/121

A trusted friend hands you a strangely colored gemstone. It seems to glow from within – a thing from another solar system. This is what mode’s release of Alain Bancquart’s Le Livre du Labyrinthe is like. There are musicians on this two-disc set I would follow anywhere: Pierre-Yves Artaud (flute), Carol Robinson (clarinet), Pascal Gallois (bassoon), Nicholas Isherwood (voice), Martine Joste (piano), and Gerard Pape (electronics). (Look up Artaud here and the others here on our search page.)

Bancquart’s gigantic six-part opus resonates with alien textures and aching lines. Suffused with intricately hewn microtonal music, each movement, scored differently, can stand alone as a unique work. This recording captures the integral premiere. Taken sequentially, each tableau seems the most remote outpost, the next unveiling something stranger still. Occasional passages throb with B-movie queasiness, yet the peculiar scales and tones make perfect sense. Bancquart isn’t some kid discovering how funky it is to play between the keys: He’s a master, effortlessly devising unbelievable sonorities.

An instrumental Prologue sets the stage. Over an uneasy murk of two violas d’amore and one cello, clarinet and bassoon croon beseechingly like stranded whales. Arranged symmetrically in Le Livre du Labyrinthe‘s grand scheme, two movements set Marie-Claire Bancquart’s poems: Icare for bass and five writhing cellos and Muertre, for vocal quartet and tape. Muertre clocks in at 34:11 as an ever-changing view. Constructed like a reluctant concerto, Labyrinthe / Miroir requires a solo piano tuned in quarter tones. Used sparingly, cymbalom and electric guitar circle in narrow tessituras. The subsequent Solitude du Minotaure demands two quarter-tone pianos and a third tuned in 16th tones. The pianos suggest bones rattling in catacombs. Muertre’s tape part offers eerily processed speech. A few spoken words spill into the clarinet and cello Epilogue, and finally we return to the light. But changed. You’ll be entranced and will return.
— Grant Chu Covell, www.lafolia.com (online review)