Mais Les Images Restent

Michael Jarrell claims for himself the status of a craftsman. Well aware that mastery of his art is acquired in the long term, he has often felt the need to return to the same object, considered from a different angle, when he judges that he now possesses more efficient tools and can express his musical ideas with greater precision. Although he says he is fascinated by artists who constantly work at the same idea, he does not seek a reduction of this kind for himself, but rather moves from one work to another through a process of reactions. That attitude is illustrated by this new album in which works and performers intersect; and the artists here are the composer's most loyal supporters. The arborescences and ruptures, the profundity of the multiple levels of interpretation we can perceive in the pieces on the programme of this disc, make us conscious of the multiplicity of the levels of meaning present in his music. Michael Jarrell's training as a visual artist has probably honed his sensitivity to forms still further. The impact on him of Paul Klee's ideas, notably concerning the relationships between forms and movements, is doubtless not foreign to the way he animates the materials with which he composes.