Essyad: Le Collier des Ruses

Some discs arrive like a dare. This one lands on the desk with the faint whiff of pedagogy about it — extensive booklet notes, a French cultural apparatus visibly at work — and you brace yourself for something worthy and unlistenable. Then the oboe enters, bent and sinuous over a bed of strings tuned to no comfort zone you know, and the dare is accepted.

Ahmed Essyad has spent a long career refusing to be filed neatly. Born near Rabat in 1939, trained in Paris under Max Deutsch — who had himself absorbed Schoenberg directly, no secondhand knowledge there — Essyad might have become just another twelve-tone functionary of the postwar European academy. He didn’t. The Arabo-Berber inheritance never left him, and rather than blending it into some tasteful East-meets-West mush, he lets the two traditions grind against each other. The booklet calls it “overriding enrichment of their specific qualities.” These things do not resolve. That friction is the point.

Le Collier des Ruses, The Necklace of Guiles, dates from 1977 but reached this recorded form only after a 1994 Strasbourg revival. An hour and a half. Four acts, each built on a Maqama, those Arabic picaresque tales — El Hamadhani’s, tenth-century, tricksters and drunkards and the corrosive comedy of money. Between acts, instrumental interludes breathe space back into the drama. It is chamber opera in scale, eight players: two violins, two violas, cello, flute, oboe, piano, percussion. Nothing chamber-sized in ambition.

The opening is the thing I keep returning to. Oboe alone, curling upward with an ornamented, almost improvisatory freedom that owes more to Fez than to Vienna. Then cello glissandos slide underneath like something coming loose. The piano answers with clusters, trills tightening into agitation. And then the voices arrive, melismatic, chanting, and you realize the two languages of this piece are not going to shake hands. They’re going to argue, beautifully, for ninety minutes.

Is this Sufi metaphysics wedded to dodecaphonic method, as the notes propose? Perhaps. I’d put it more plainly: this is theater of unresolved tension, act by act. Essyad seems to trust his listeners to sit inside that discomfort rather than have it explained away. The vocal writing is often severe, declamatory, closer to cantillation than to anything Puccini would recognize as line. A solo cello keens behind the reciter in the first Maqama’s Fable of the Wine, sombre, exposed, unaccompanied by any harmonic safety net.

I won’t pretend this is easy company. There are stretches where the twelve-tone rigor feels like exactly that: rigor, imposed, a little airless, before the Arabo-Berber vocal material breaks back through and the piece remembers to breathe. But when it works, and it works more often than not, the effect is genuinely unlike anything else in the postwar operatic literature.

The K617 engineering favors clarity over warmth. You hear every trill, every reed vibration, sometimes uncomfortably close, which suits music this exposed. Whether this account, drawn from the Strasbourg production, will ever have serious rivals is doubtful; this is not repertoire labels queue up to duplicate. For now it stands alone.

Difficult, yes. Essential for anyone curious about where opera might still go when it refuses easy synthesis. Not a comfortable evening. A necessary one.