Gérard Grisey’s “Le Noir de L’Étoile” at Yellow Barn, Putney, VT, Friday, May 25 at 8.16 pm

Vela Pulsar

Gérard Grisey (1946-1998) Le Noir de l'Etoile (1989-90)
for six percussionists placed around an audience
James Beauton
Greg Beyer
Amy Garapic
Doug Perkins
Jeff Stern
Mari Yoshinaga

On 25 May 2012,  Yellow Barn presented a unique event: an open-air performance of Gérard Grisey's Le Noir de l'Étoile. This roughly hour-long work for six percussion players encircling the audience was Grisey's response to his discovery of the sound of pulsars. Neither Grisey, although he taught at Berkeley  for four years, nor the largely European movement to which he belonged for a while, Spectralism, is very well known in the United States. Last year's American tour by Les Percussions de Strasbourg in which they played Le Noir de l'Étoile (for a review of their Lincoln Center performance, click here) and the New York Philharmonic residency of Grisey's pupil, Magnus Lindberg, have done something to correct that. Susanna Mälkki recently conducted Grisey's 1977 work, Modulations, with the San Francisco Symphony, reviewed here by Steven Kruger.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!