From Philips 836 887:

Sixteen years have passed since the initial hearing of Pierre Henry's "Veil of Orpheus ", probably the first major work of symphonic concrete music, though composed for an opera ("Orpheus 53", written with Pierre Schaeffer for the Donauescliingen Festival). At the time it stood out from among the many experiments as finished and significant; it sounds as valid today despite the great progress made by the technical evolution upon which electro-acoustical music so closely depends.

I say symphonic because the score calls for a large number of "concrete instruments" the history and specifications of which we need not go into here; indeed one of the essential conditions of concrete music is transmutation, and the actual origin of a sound is relatively unimportant. But Pierre Henry profoundly individualizes instruments and instrumental (or choral) ensembles, as would classical composers, without adopting classical molds. What is astonishing is that here in the infancy of concrete music he had already reinvented everything: a mysterious quality in the orchestral fabric, a large, complex rhythmic structure, a polyphony of rhythms and sound planes obeying no known rules and nevertheless achieving a unity, an internal logic, that cannot be gainsaid.

The point is that this music is dominated, organized and drawn onwards by a vision that does not show itself until the final stage of its development. All of Pierre Henry's major compositions are attuned to his personality. In the "Veil of Orpheus" we already recognize his two main "ideas", in fact two aspects of the same problem : the mystery of religion and the mystery of death; man's questioning, as seen in "The Trip", "Variations for a Door and a Sigh", "The Green Queen", the "Liverpool Mass", and the "Apocalypse of St. John", may explain Pierre Henry's "vocation" for the most violent, the most intangible, the purest concrete and electronic music - that which seems to bring us into contact with the sound matter of the universe through some sort of pantheistic connivance.

From the outset Pierre Henry establishes an atmosphere both lyrical and tragic by the use of wide, slow-moving, rich-textured brush strokes upon which he embroiders violent percussive effects and evil-sounding motifs. This grandiose tumult is followed by a liturgy of distant voices planing above an enigmatic pulsation like the beating of a heart; then the orchestration of the noises becomes less harsh, lighter, and the work builds up extremely slowly, with out-of- focus images, to an Elysian height where the voices and "instruments" finally fade away, as if passing into a paradise of ultra-sounds.

Hereupon the Orphic hymn, declamed in Greek, becomes the basis of a huge word- symphony of concrete music in which the voice, decomposed and duplicated, wells up at every level of the sound spectrum accompanied by musical themes from the opening sections and dialoguing in particular with an extraordinary "solar lyre" (harpsichord), for which Pierre Henry found the exact instrumental image. At first purely lyrical, the spoken symphony grows increasingly dramatic until the final, vain struggle of the hero, who dies invoking the name of Zeus.

The "Veil of Orpheus" is presented here in two versions : the first, considered too long (27 min. 15 sec.) in 1953, was abandoned in favor of the second (15 min, 40 sec.), which served as the ending of the Maurice Bejart-Pierre Henry ballet "Orpheus" in 1958. The juxtaposition of these two versions is interesting, and it is difficult to choose between them. The shorter version conserves all the essential elements of the longer and sounds as perfectly unified as if it had originally been written in this form. But the first version breathes more easily, and the feeling of mystery is more poignant, more profound, for the slowness of tempo corresponds to an essential characteristic of the composer's personality.

Two short "studies" fill out this recording: "Entity" and "Spiral" (the final section of the Flaubert-Bejart "Temptation of St. Anthony"), which out of very simple elements grips the listener with the cosmic anguish that is part and parcel of Pierre Henry's art.

Jacques LONCHAMPT