Heath (2023)

Another piece from the USA followed, [by] the multitalented Matthew Aucoin, born in 1990...A friend who is also attending Yannick’s festival in Baden-Baden raved to me about a cinema broadcast, live from the Metropolitan Opera, in which Nézet-Séguin conducted Aucoin’s Eurydice...

Aucoin’s clever handling of the orchestra...creates a thrilling tone- and soundworld, which one listens to with pleasure...In Lear, the wind and brass instruments in particular come wonderfully into their own. This music, premiered just ten days earlier in New York, makes one curious for more. (The Met’s Intendant, Peter Gelb, announced before the concert that Aucoin is writing another opera.)

A new piece by American composer Matthew Aucoin was one of the most rewarding parts of the evening. His Heath (King Lear Sketches) leaves Lear, Cordelia etc and explores the heath itself, a barren place where the boundary between sanity and madness begins to blur. Aucoin’s soundscape is cold, but immediately accessible. Despite the complexity of his writing, the composition has a lyricism and intense drama that captivates the ear. There’s a huge amount to enjoy: devilish writing for the woodwinds – anxious and heaving in the first section and almost virtuosic in the second section (The Fool) in the way it insidiously slips across the stage, goading and taunting, setting teeth on edge. The percussion is no less accomplished, virtually spitting in The Divided Kingdom before concluding the piece in the fourth section in an uncomfortable, jarring way. It’s a work that could be heard on repeat without boredom, despite the madness that might ensue.

[“Nézet-Séguin] was equally commanding in Heath (‘King Lear’ Sketches) by Matthew Aucoin, the preternaturally talented 33-year-old whose Eurydice received its Metropolitan Opera premiere in 2021. Replete with funereal bells and a sense of faded pomp, the fourpart tone poem included a glittering and skittish scherzo for Lear’s fool and a desolate oboe melody over harp and vibraphone suggesting the haunted wanderings of the blinded Gloucester.

Tchaikovsky’s [Romeo and Juliet]...was followed by a powerful performance of MatthewAucoin’s Heath (King Lear Sketches), a bleak depiction of Lear’s fulminating madness on the heath...Outstanding playing here emphasized the coded messages concealed beneath the jester’s manic clowning...The work closes with Lear’s last breath, subtly suggested by a gentle whisper of percussion.

Matthew Aucoin (born in 1990) assumes his share of modernity with Heath (King Lear Sketches), in its French premiere. It’s a short piece, composed in 2023, remarkable for the quality and the richness of its orchestration, divided into four sections played without a break: ‘The Divided Kingdom,’ announced by bells playing a haunting rhythm which summons a desolate soundscape (in the strings), out of which emerge numerous isolated timbres (piccolo, contrabassoon), an initial sketch which progressively yields to an episode of tense lyricism in which one is especially struck by the strings, the horns and the trumpets; the second section, ‘The Fool,’ gives pride of place to the xylophone, supported by strings, within which gusts of wind mingle to most beautiful effect...”

...[Aucoin] exemplifies this blend of accessibility and subtlety that American institutions seek to cultivate in contemporary music, and the accomplished lyricism of certain passages (for instance, the superb third movement, ‘I have no way’), make one want to hear it at work in a complete opera.

…Aucoin’s restraint in handling these huge forces is one of the most notable things about ‘Heath,’ whose four sections, played without pause, exude a confident, brooding reserve…. This first section…shows Aucoin’s talent for creating orchestral textures that are simultaneously granitic and flickering, like fast-shifting storm clouds. Sharp snaps of snare drum punctuate a gradual increase in forcefulness to a bleak, expansive landscape of solemn brasses and a droning in the strings, which melts into an almost Tchaikovskian Romantic sweep…. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, deserves credit for consistently leading this richly gifted composer’s works with both organizations.