Xenakis - Medea-Senecae (1967) (with score)

Iannis Xenakis .... captures better than anybody the madness, terror and ‘ecstatic dream world’ that Nietzsche defines as characterising Greek tragedy.
In 1967, Xenakis was commissioned by the Theatre de France to write the music for a production of Seneca’s Medea. Xenakis scholar Nouritza Matossian (an Armenian from Cyprus) says:
‘Xenakis had often wondered how the music of ancient Greek theatre might have sounded, how the actors, chorus and musicians might have chanted the text and played the aulos and in [Medea] he provided his solution. He treated the instruments as voices and the voices as instruments to create an implacable work, extending the language phonetically with whispers and hisses, repeated phrases and even banging stones. The atmosphere is archaic, with a setting which is both raucous and primitive.’
Regarding the work, Xenakis says that when he was approached to write it:
‘I hesitated because I knew Seneca as a pseudo-philosopher, an imperial courtier, and above all a Roman who sought, like all Romans of that period, to emulate the ancient Greek masterpieces.‘But in reading the Latin text written in the first century AD I was seduced by its violent sonority, its barbarity, so I agreed.’
(@hellenicantidote-San-Francisco-Examiner)
Conductor: Marius Constant
Chorus: Chœurs de l'ORTF
Ensemble Ars Nova

[@jsabuilds2404]

The fart jumpscare at the beginning got me good.

[@shandordorii7226]

A Masterpiece!

[@gogyeongbin]

One of the well-known example of using 1/3 sharp, I was searching for. Thankyou

[@markoslavicek]

Didn't Xenakis use 1/3 sharps in many other pieces as well? If so, there could be much better known examples than this piece, if that's what you're looking for.

[@BrianJosephMorgan]

Magnifique.

[@maryowen6094]

instruments as voices !!! yes, I enter the sound so much more reading that. And voices as instruments. 😃

[@ContemporaryClassical]

I should point out that at about bar 685 there appear to be a few bars missing in the current recording. Is this a different version of the score, a recording edit mistake, or something else?

[@markoslavicek]

I don't know about the alternative versions nor am I an expert on this piece, but what I do know is that this wouldn't be the only instance of Xenakis making cuts. I had an opportunity to hear the recording of Persephassa live at Mycenae in 1978 and to talk to one of the performers, Jean-Louis Forestier. Noticing that the score didn't quite correspond to the recording, I asked him about it and he confirmed that some bits were taken out to shorten the overall event (he still keeps the score after all those years with the crossed out bars, so he was even able to tell me the exact numbers that didn't make it to the show). The same seemed to have been done with Oresteia at the same occasion, but I didn't investigate that one yet. I assume something similar may have been the case with this recording too, however, the circumstances are unknown to me. In short, there might not be any 'different versions' of the same piece, but rather different recordings that were adjusted for a specific event.

[@ContemporaryClassical]

@@markoslavicek Oh yes, I've tried to read Oresteia with the score, and the performance didn't correspond at all! Here it's just a small cut, though it's also true that no one's going to miss those bars!