It took Brice Pauset more than two decades to complete his cycle of 24 canons for piano, and this double CD presents it in full for the first time. The British pianist Nicolas Hodges plays the four books, from Trois Canons of 1989 to Sept Canons of 2010, and adds Perspectivæ Sintagma I, a canonic work for piano and live electronics realised at IRCAM. Everything here is a first recording.
Pauset was born in Besançon in 1965. He studied composition with Michel Philippot and Gérard Grisey at the Paris Conservatoire and with Franco Donatoni in Siena, followed the IRCAM Cursus in 1994, and alongside composing pursued doctoral studies in medieval philosophy at Louvain. Since 2010 he has taught composition at the Freiburg Musikhochschule, and from 2012 to 2019 he was artistic director of Ensemble Contrechamps. The recording is a WDR Köln production of 2016, with Günther Wollersheim as producer and Harry Vogt as executive producer. For the electronic work Benjamin Lévy handled IRCAM computer music production, from a design by Eric Daubresse and Olivier Pasquet.
What draws Pauset to the canon is the point where a technique turns into an aesthetic experience, a mystery he finds in Renaissance masters of vocal polyphony such as Johannes Ockeghem. The cycle grows by odd numbers: three canons, then five (1990-2002), seven, and the nine of the Neuf Canons (2004-2010). Over that long span his divided relationship with the piano changes. In Neuf Canons he pushes the instrument to its limits and turns Hodges, a keyboard virtuoso, into a pedal virtuoso. The Cinq Canons are the largest set, at almost half an hour.
The second disc holds Perspectivæ Sintagma I (1997), 23 minutes long, where the historical canon technique is applied most radically. The electronics follow the pianist live, adjusting interpretation and musical text to each other and folding the differences back into the composition. Pauset wrote the booklet notes on the cycle himself, next to a text by Marcia Hadjimarkos, with notes in French, English and German.
Double CD, Wergo WER 7365 2, released in 2017, a production of WDR Köln licensed by WDR mediagroup.
