From Stéphane Denève’s debut performance as Artistic Director of the New World Symphony, enjoy Henri Dutilleux's orchestral showpiece by a French composer for an American orchestra.

During a career that spanned the entire second half of the 20th century, Henri Dutilleux managed to avoid the dogmas and orthodoxies that weighed down so many of his contemporaries. After training at the Paris Conservatory, Dutilleux earned the establishment’s seal of approval when he won the prestigious Rome Prize in 1938, although the outbreak of World War II cut short his Italian residency. By the time he first encountered Schoenberg’s 12-tone principles after the war, he was already far enough down his own independent path that he didn’t get too swept up like his younger colleagues. Instead, Dutilleux crystallized his intuitive sound in a breakthrough Piano Sonata from 1948, and he honed his orchestral palette in the Symphony No. 1 from 1951. Working to exacting standards and at a glacial pace, Dutilleux ended up completing only a dozen works for orchestra during a career that stretched into his nineties.

Métaboles originated in 1959 as a commission to celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Cleveland Orchestra, but it took Dutilleux five years to deliver the 17-minute score. It was a period when the composer was questioning the formal models of his forebears, and seeking new principles that could organize the structure of a piece; in this case, he developed a novel solution by linking five interconnected sections that morph through a series of “metabolisms.”

Each section highlights a different subset of the orchestra, starting with the woodwinds in an elemental mood Dutilleux described as Incantatory. Near the end, a thick block of strings materializes and then dissipates, previewing their featured role in the second section, Linear. Dry plucking from a single bass begins a process that blooms into punctuated brass in the third section, Obsessive. Out of that climax, a shadowy continuation from clarinets and percussion introduces the dominant voices of the fourth section, Torpid. The Flamboyant finale is the shortest section, and it brings all the orchestral forces together for an enigmatic ending that metabolizes and recontextualizes earlier material.

- © 2023 Aaron Grad

Originally performed April 8, 2023.