Dutilleux: Correspondances – Hannigan, Salonen

Some scores announce themselves. Dutilleux’s don’t — they accumulate, breath by breath, until you realize you’ve been inside a sound-world for twenty minutes without noticing the door close behind you.

Correspondances is the reason to seek out this disc, and it has waited a long time for a recording worthy of it. I heard the piece’s shadow-life for years before this — a broadcast here, a stray performance there, always the sense of encountering something precious that kept slipping back into the vault. Dawn Upshaw was the dedicatee, and rightly so; her voice, cool and pure as spring water, seems the instrument Dutilleux composed for even when someone else is singing. But Barbara Hannigan makes her own persuasive case, and evidently made it persuasively enough that the composer himself reordered his cycle for her and wrote her a new ending. That’s not a small thing. Dutilleux was not a man who revised carelessly, or often.

The cycle takes its title from Baudelaire — the poem on synaesthesia, the correspondences among the senses — though the texts wander far from that source: two Rilke miniatures both called “Gong,” a text by the Indian-French poet Prithwindra Mukherjee on cosmic mystery, and, extraordinarily, two actual letters. One is Solzhenitsyn’s to Rostropovich and his wife Galina Vishnevskaya, written in gratitude and defiance; the other is Van Gogh’s letter to his brother Theo, trembling with the peculiar serenity of a man who knows he is ending. Dutilleux quotes within these songs — subtly, never as pastiche — and the effect is of memory surfacing through orchestral haze rather than any obvious homage.

The revised ordering matters more than it might look on paper. Beginning now with “Gong (1),” the cycle opens on a literal stroke — sound as shock, as summons — rather than easing in. Danse cosmique follows, propulsive and glittering, and then comes a passage of scarcely a minute, scored with accordion and tuba of all things, that is pure Dutilleux fingerprint: that bruised, luminous sonority nobody else gets, not even his students. It’s over almost before you register how strange it is. Then the Solzhenitsyn letter, weighted and grave. The old ordering buried the two “Gong” settings side by side before the final song; the new one is more theatrical, more inevitable-feeling. I’m not sure “improvement” is the right word — Dutilleux thought in decades, not drafts — but it is more dramatically taut.

Hannigan sings all this with an intelligence that never curdles into coolness. Her upper register has an unforced brightness — no strain audible even where the tessitura climbs uncomfortably — and she has the rare gift of floating a pianissimo that still carries text. Whether she surpasses Upshaw I genuinely cannot say with confidence; memory is an unreliable accompanist. But she inhabits the music as her own, and that is enough.

Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France are ideal partners throughout the disc, not just in the premiere album. Salonen has long had an affinity for scores built from color and atmosphere rather than thematic development in the German sense — no surprise, given his own compositional sympathies — and he draws playing of remarkable transparency here, so that Dutilleux’s dense chordal writing never turns to sludge. You hear inner voices that other conductors let vanish.

Tout un monde lointain, the cello concerto after Baudelaire, gets a performance from Anssi Karttunen that trades sumptuousness for something leaner and more exact. Where Rostropovich — for whom the piece was written, and who all but owns its interpretive history — brought a Romantic’s fervor and a golden, enveloping tone, Karttunen is more astringent, more concerned with line than with luxuriance. I missed, at moments, the sheer sensuous weight Rostropovich commanded in “Houles,” that middle movement built on undulation. But Karttunen’s clarity pays dividends in the finale, where the cello’s filigree needs to cut through the orchestral wash rather than melt into it.

The Shadows of Time, written in the mid-1990s partly in memory of Anne Frank, closes the program on its most somber note — those bell-like interjections, the children’s voices intoning fragmentary questions, the sense of history pressing on the present tense. Salonen paces it beautifully, refusing to rush toward its devastating quiet ending.

This is, in sum, an essential release — not because the couplings are unavailable elsewhere (Rostropovich’s own recordings of the cello concerto remain treasurable), but because Correspondances finally exists on disc in a reading that honors what a strange, haunted, exquisite piece it is. Dutilleux waited a long time for many things. This one was worth the wait.