A live recording from the Brian Ferneyhough ‘Total Immersion’ event held at The Barbican, London, on 26th Feburary 2011. This was the culmination of a day of concerts, performances, and talks, which also included the UK premiere of Ferneyhough’s more recent orchestral piece ‘Plötzlichkeit’. ‘La Terre Est Un Homme’ is one of the most notoriously dense and complex scores ever produced, as evidenced by its sheer physical size (demonstrated when conductor Martyn Brabbins triumphantly held it up at the end of the performance). But the music is by no means ‘inaccesible’. Tim Rutherford-Johnson, on ‘The Rambler’ blog, writes: “As if to make a mockery of both my slow assimilation approach to Ferneyhough’s music, and the view that compositional complexity is inversely proportional to emotional effect, this was a quite staggering kick in the guts. I have no idea how the performance measured up to those two from 1979 but frankly it didn’t matter — most of us were left speechless. The organisers and participants in this Total Immersion day had done their best to cut through the huff and bluster that surrounds Ferneyhough and his music, but they struggled. In the end it came down to this one piece.”

“And one particular moment. You see, there is a dark secret to La terre: a hushed string chord of incredible luminosity that suddenly leaps out of the pages of phenomenally dense writing. As a moment of recontextualisation I know nothing else quite like it; it was so unlike anything I had been prepared to expect that I was almost knocked out of my seat. You had to be there. In the end, nothing spoke so eloquently or gripped so powerfully as Ferneyhough’s music itself.”

The only previous recording of this work is of the world premiere, from 1979, in which what sounds like a fine performance is marred by horrendous sound quality – effectively losing 50% of a work which is packed with so much detail and colour. In any case, a recording cannot really hope to capture the full impact of this piece, heard live, with musicians and instruments sharing one’s physical space; nonetheless, as it’s not likely to be performed very often, this recording (from the radio broadcast of the concert) is probably the best we’ll have to go on for some time.

The performers are the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Martyn Brabbins; the painting shown in this video, from which the composition derives its title, is Roberto Matta’s ‘La Terre est Un Homme’.