Métaboles

Program notes

About the Work

Métaboles is, alongside his two symphonies and the cello concerto, one of the works on which Henri Dutilleux’s reputation as a master orchestrator rests. It was commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra and its conductor George Szell to mark the orchestra’s fortieth anniversary, and the Cleveland players gave the premiere in January 1965. Dutilleux, true to his exacting nature, had laboured over the score for several years, and the result is a tautly organised, brilliantly coloured single span lasting around seventeen minutes, a piece that has become one of his most frequently performed orchestral works.

The title points directly to the music’s method. A ‘metabole’ is, in rhetoric, a figure in which the same idea is restated in transformed words; in biology, ‘metabolism’ is the process of continual change by which a living thing renews itself. Dutilleux uses the word to describe a music in which the material is constantly being transmuted: themes are not so much developed in the traditional sense as made to mutate, shifting their shape, colour, and character as they pass from one section of the orchestra to another. The work unfolds in five linked movements, played without a break, each bearing a single evocative adjective for a title: Incantatoire, Linéaire, Obsessionnel, Torpide, and Flamboyant. The five are bound together by an ingenious scheme: each movement grows out of the material of the one before, and a thematic cell is handed on from section to section, so that the whole forms a continuous chain of transformation that finally returns, in the blazing finale, to recall the very opening.

The other organising principle is orchestral colour. Each of the five movements foregrounds a different family of instruments (woodwinds, strings, brass, percussion, and finally the full ensemble) so that the piece becomes a kind of journey through the orchestra, every panel painted in its own distinct hue. This pairing of structural rigour with sensuous, ever-shifting sound is quintessential Dutilleux: a composer who built his music like a watchmaker yet made it shimmer like Debussy. Métaboles is at once a study in metamorphosis and a celebration of the modern orchestra’s capacity for colour, and it sits naturally on a programme that asks, throughout, what an orchestra can be made to sound like.

What to Listen For

The five movements run together without pause, so the most rewarding way to listen is to follow how the music changes colour and character as it passes from one to the next, and to notice that each section spotlights a different part of the orchestra.

Incantatoire opens the work with the woodwinds to the fore, weaving a hushed, ritual, spell-like music, incantatory in the literal sense, as if summoning something into being. Listen for the small thematic cell introduced here, because it will be handed on and transformed throughout.

Linéaire turns to the strings, spinning a long, sustained, singing line of great expressive warmth, the most lyrical and flowing of the five. Obsessionnel then shifts the spotlight to the brass, with an insistent, driving, repetitive figure that lives up to its name: a fixed idea hammered and circled obsessively.

Torpide (‘torpid’, sluggish) is the strange, brooding heart of the piece, dominated by percussion and dark, slow-moving sonorities: heavy, drowsy, faintly menacing. Out of this torpor bursts Flamboyant, the dazzling finale for full orchestra: fast, brilliant, and ablaze with colour, it gathers the work’s transformed material and drives it to a glittering climax, recalling the very opening before the final, incandescent close.