HENRI DUTILLEUX, THE SOUND OF HIS VOICE

Henri Dutilleux began his research into the voice in 1944 working with Jean Cassous’s « 33 Sonnets Composed in Secret », then with a brief passage form « the shadows of Time », in 1994. If he often refers to a tree-structure composition (especially in « L’arbre des songes ») to explain the direction his work has been taking since 1938, it is most of all in its close ties with painting and poetry that we find the crux of the mystery of his repertoire. Too, his most recent piece, « Correspondances », with its Baudelarian overtones, attempts to open a new road in the field of singing. Henri Dutilleux invites us to witness this work as well as an intimate exploration of his past experiments. « Henri Dutilleux, the sound of his voice » – the title expressed the double musical movement of my film : the coming-and going- between the score coming to life as we watch and the composer who explains its conception, right up to the moment singer Daw Upshaw and conductor Sir Simon Rattle appropriate it during rehearsals with the Berlin Philarmonic on the eve of the premiere.