Even if he had written just one work – Quatre Chants pour Franchir le Seuil, not performed until after his shockingly sudden death in 1998 at the age of 52 – Gérard Grisey would deserve his place among the greatest composers of the second half of the 20th century. But as one of the architects of spectralism in the 1970s, Grisey’s achievement and influence extended far beyond that achingly beautiful final masterpiece. Beyond his native France though, only a handful of his works are at all familiar: besides the Quatre Chants there are the pieces that make up the six-part cycle Les Espaces Acoustiques, and the late Vortex Temporum, which takes a motif from Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé as its starting point. But the rest of his substantial output remains little explored.
