Les Douze Gardiens du Temple

Album review

French composer Laurent Petitgirard is best known for his film scores and for the success of his opera Joseph Merrick, dit Elephant Man, which has received numerous productions since its premiere in 1999. The three tumultuously expressionist orchestral pieces recorded here are notable for their colorful orchestration, remarkably high energy, and inventive and unconventional sense of musical development, and they offer further confirmation of the composer's skill as a musical dramatist. The ballet Euphonia takes its scenario from an eccentric futuristic fable by Berlioz, set in the year 2315. In the city of Euphonia, which is governed by a composer and populated entirely by musicians, a young composer takes revenge on the woman who rejected him by having her crushed by a machine that is activated by particular harmonies. (One can't help wondering what the composer of Symphonie Fantastique would have done with the story had he set it himself.) Petitgirard's treatment is no disappointment, though; the evocative and roiling orchestration and the score's over-the-top theatricality make the ballet hugely effective. Poème and the cryptically titled Les Douze Gardiens du Temple share many of the musical attributes of the ballet and demonstrate the composer's mastery of manipulating dramatic tension. Petitgirard leads the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine and the Ljubljana Radio Symphony Orchestra in assured and riveting performances.
© TiVo

Details of original recording : 67:03 - DDD - Enregistré en septembre 2005 à la Salle Franklin à Bordeaux (France) - Notes en français, anglais & allemand