Jürg Frey — Je Laisse à La Nuit Son Poids D’ombre
Je Laisse à La Nuit Son Poids D’ombre is a fifty-two-minute modern ensemble for ten players. It slowly shifts from hauntingly beautiful to discordant, dark, and at times, primal unease. The whole thing feels like a wonderfully muddying/darkening of the sonic waters.
I’d hope regular readers of M[m] will know the name Jürg Frey, as we’ve been reviewing his work since the late 2010’s on the site. And he also stands as one of the great/ notable names in modern classical/ modern composition genres. And I must say, Je Laisse à La Nuit Son Poids D’ombre ( I Leave to the Night Its Weight of Shadow) stands as one of his (initially) more formally beautiful works.
The CD release appears on the always-worthy Another Timbre, with their house style, sparse white mini gatefold packaging featuring a very fitting photograph of a shadowy hooded figure standing on a dusk-time shoreline.
Je Laisse à La Nuit Son Poids D’ombre dates from 2019/ 2020- with the ten-piece Ensemble]h[iatus playing the five-track suite. The French-German-Italian ensemble features: Martine Altenburger -cello, Tiziana Bertoncini -violin, Fabrice Charles- trombone, Isabelle Duthoit -clarinet, Laurent Guitton-tuba, Lê Quan Ninh- percussion, Hélène Fauchère & Géraldine Keller- voice, Thomas Lehn -analogue synthesiser, Alessandra Rombolá -flute.
We open with the slowly drifting and ebbing of the two female sopranos- together they create a beautifully haunting haze of sound. As we progress, subtle instrumental detail & pitch moves in- with the vocals, paring back from time to time. We move from foreboding string simmers, unsettling percussive taps & knocks, wavering horn drifts, and general atmospheric tone drift/ building shadow/darkness
As we move through the work, dissonant string picks become more telling, the doomily dirge-bound horn tones expand, with the erringly tolling/ primal percussion runs grow, and more warbling ‘n’ waving vocalising rising.
Put simply, Je Laisse à La Nuit Son Poids D’ombre is truly spellbinding, with both the composer and players creating a work that moves between beauty and unease, with moments of primal dread. If I hadn’t already selected my best of 2025 list, this would certainly have appeared in it.