For a long time, musical opinion tended to dismiss Henri Dutilleux as a pale imitation of Messiaen or as a latter-day Debussy. Then, in the last decade, the refined sensitivity of his musical invention was recognized and his music was taken up by a number of influential musicians. Today, following the recent death of Messiaen, Dutilleux is justifiably recognized as France's leading composer and as one of a handful of great composers throughout the world. This welcome disc from Erato of three of his outstanding orchestral scores gives a marvellous introduction to his music and his sound world.
The earliest of the pieces is Metaboles, composed in 1964. It's a single-movement concerto for orchestra, though with five clearly defined sections to each of which Dutilleux gives a descriptive title. Rostropovich and the French National Orchestra play the work with commitment, though not always with much subtlety. Certainly, one longs for much more warmth of string tone in the second section ''Lineaire'' and I have heard performances of much greater rhythmic precision and brilliance in the final section ''Flamboyant''. The other piece for large orchestra was commissioned by Rostropovich for his National Symphony Orchestra in Washington and premiered there in 1978. The work's inspiration was a contemplation of van Gogh's painting, ''The starry night'' and though the title, Timbres, espace, mouvement, may sound forbidding, the music is not. As in so much of his music, Dutilleux writes for his unusually scored orchestra with great delicacy, conjuring up vivid combinations and juxtapositions of orchestral colour.
The most recent piece on the disc was commissioned in 1989 by Paul Sacher, without whose generous patronage music since the Second World War would be so much poorer. Mystere de l'instant, a series of ten 'snapshots', is given a fine performance by the Collegium Musicum under Sacher's direction. Again, one is left bewitched and entranced by the kaleidoscopic textures and sonorities created from a small string orchestra and a handful of percussion instruments by this master composer.'