In the Mood for Structure

“Music is drama, pathos, death. When it is not, when it does not overstep every boundary, it is nothing at all.”

For Jean Barraqué, music was never an intellectual exercise but an existential act. Every gesture pushes forward with urgency. Barraqué’s music asks for concentration, but gives back drama, colour and a powerful sense of presence.

Nicolas Hodges brings to this music both pianistic authority and a rare intimacy. Having given the first performances of most of Barraqué's piano works, he returns to it with a familiarity earned over decades.

Paulus kirke is more than an atmospheric setting. Its neo-Gothic arches and ribs do not conceal the forces that hold the building together. They dramatise them. In Barraqué’s music, something similar happens: the drama comes through the structure. Nowhere is this more true than in his Piano Sonata from 1952, monumental and turbulent, a work in which every gesture feels necessary.

Late in the evening, the city shifts tempo. In the dark, resonant space of the church, the music’s eruptions and long journey towards stillness become a vigil.

Programme

Jean Barraqué

Retour (1945–47)

Intermezzo (1949)

Pièce pour piano (1949)

Deux morceaux (1949)

Thème et variations (1949)

Sonate pour piano (1950–52)

Piano: Nicolas Hodges

Want to know more?

• Paulusfestivalen is a neighbourhood festival in and around Paulus Church in Grünerløkka, built by volunteers, local schools and cultural workers. Barraqué’s uncompromising music belongs not only in specialist concert halls but in the middle of the city, as a concentrated and shared experience open to anyone willing to stay.
• Jean Barraqué studied composition with Olivier Messiaen in Paris in the late 1940s and led an increasingly secluded life. He completed only a handful of works before his death in 1973, aged 44.
• Nicolas Hodges encountered this music early: at sixteen he was already studying composition with Morton Feldman and playing Pierre Boulez’s piano piece Structures II in a school concert. Postwar modernism arrived for him as a dangerous, open and living landscape. “Barraqué’s fiery and passionate music has fascinated me since my teens, even when it turns ashen. Music descending into silence — truly an extraordinary experience.”