Yellow Barn to Present and Open-Air Performance of Gérard Grisey’s “Le Noir de L’Étoile” at Greenwood School Playing Fields, Putney, VT, Friday, May 25 at 8.16 pm, by Michael Miller
Listen to Vela Pulsar on the Berkshire Review.
At sunset on 25 May, Yellow Barn will be presenting 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.

