A Night on the Threshold: London Sinfonietta Reimagines Grisey
- Mingyue Ariane Li
- Dec 11, 2025
- 8 min read
When
28 Nov 2025
Where
Southbank Centre's Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
Who
Jack Sheen conductor
Nina Guo soprano
Jonathan Morton violin
London Sinfonietta
Tony Simpson lighting
What
Cassandra Miller for mira
Rebecca Saunders Stirrings Still II
John White Drinking and Hooting Machine
Gérard Grisey Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil
While you hear very little amid the tangled wash of sounds on a rush-hour tube journey into central London on a Friday evening, the ride’s destination—a brilliantly curated programme of liminal music—invites you to hear a mesmerising multitude within a sonic cosmos so minuscule, so fragile.
Twenty-six years after its 1999 world premiere with the London Sinfonietta, Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (“Four Songs to Cross the Threshold”)—Gérard Grisey’s last, posthumous work—returned to the ensemble that first breathed life into it, this time at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. The piece lends this hauntingly beautiful evening its name; around it are set three further “songs” by Cassandra Miller, Rebecca Saunders, and John White. For all their differences of conception, format, and technique, they meet at a single nodal point: a liminal cast of mind. “Liminal”—Grisey’s own preferred term over “spectral” for a music that turns sound inside out and multiplies the one into many—aptly describes an aesthetic common to all four works: an obsessive curiosity about the inner life of sound. First presented in narrow cones of light against almost complete darkness (the first two pieces), then in an evenly spread, gently dimmed glow that wrapped the stage in a cool haze (the latter two), these works, each in its own way, seemed continualy to test and traverse thresholds—slipping into the in-between, the netherworld, the erstwhile; brushing the edges of perception; rousing not only the subconscious but something almost subcutaneous.
Death haunts this programme, but in Miller’s for mira for solo violin, Jonathan Morton drew out its exuberence with gritty focus. Miller’s source material is “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” (also known as “In the Pines” or “Black Girl”), the last song Kurt Cobain sang at his legendary MTV Unplugged concert, five months before his suicide. Working imaginatively with mediation and “musics found”, Miller recomposed the song from a snippet of a computer-transcribed version of Cobain’s voice. Cobain’s relatively plain delivery—which in the original turns increasingly mournful and torn—here evaporates into something utterly luminous, febrile, and startlingly visceral. From the outset Morton adopted a low-gravity posture, knees slightly bent, channelling the music’s intensity outward; its streaks of sarcasm provoked giggles in the audience.
Curiously, the saturated tone colour (in a major tonality) and the highly strained melodic gestures seemed to summon less Cobain’s angsty cover than the older, folky tradition of the song. For listeners aware of the rich social history of the song—particularly its tie to the murder-ballad tradition imported by the Euorpeans into American folk—the ghost of bluegrass mandolin strummings and of yodelling almost oozed from Morton’s playing: from the violin’s heart-wrenching portamentos and the metallic gleam of those double stops, executed with immaculate control. A hallmark of murder-ballad songs is the concealment of something gruesome beneath an almost cronning surface. Cobain’s interpretation, often regarded eerily prescient, intensifies this creepiness; Miller’s decision to rewrite it offers a no less unsettling demonstration of how music mobilises memories of life and death across centuries, races, and cultures. Subjected to a process of chopping and looping, the melodic material contracts and hardens, acquiring an almost mechanical sheen, until the music appears to migrate into the performer’s body: Morton and the song fused into a single, spasming instrument, and it became uncertain whether the body was sounding the music or the music was convulsing the body.
What followed emerged seamlessly, yet in shocking contrast. Seating less than three meters from the giant, resonating wooden container that opens Saunder’s Stirring Still II—i.e. a double bass—I found myself stunned by Enno Senft’s loose bowing near the bridge and the mesmerisingly rich sounds it drew out. Whatever was contained in this sonic multitude, released by what appeared to be the simplest strike of a “note”, scarcely required specially “intense” listening to become manifest. Like much of Saunders’s music, the piece is best encountered in the situated experience of live performance. The audience was encircled by six musicians dispersed across the space—piano, crotales, and double bass on stage; alto flute, clarinet, and oboe beside the seats. It is an invitation to sharpen one’s listening within an environment where the auditory threshold seemed compressed to a fraction of its usual range. Metaphors we habitually reach for when verbalising musical experience become almost literal: sounds travelled and met in space, merging, splitting, intertwining again. To more “classical” ears these might be seen as “half-formed” sounds; not only were the boundaries between sound and music blurred, but so too were the edges of the sonic entities themselves, creating the illusion of electronics and stretching the pacing of time into an indivisible present. Most extraordinary, though, are those instants when a soft, airy flutter-tonguing—or better still, nothing more than a long-held, toneless breath—seemed to drift across from the far side of the hall: something so fragile and simple, yet utterly precious to ears attuned to the urban soundscape one finds in London (in fact, with ears still “bleeding” from the merciless clanking of the Friday rush-hour Tube just moments before, I experienced it as a kind of blessed remedy).
With a more overtly anti-establishment humour than Miller’s, Drinking and Hooting Machine came across as the programme’s cheerful renegade. Though it follows the kind of systems- or instruction-based procedure popularised by the likes of Cage and Cardew in the 1960s, its sonic rationale is not so far from Saunders’s instrumental sculpture or “spatial concert piece”. Conductor Jack Sheen and soprano Nina Guo joined all the musicians sipping, swigging, gulpping, as instructed, coaxing “hoots” from glass bottles filled with liquid, an amorphous sound-cloud stirred into life on stage, continually mutating as performers in different groups carried out their pre-ordained sequences in a free style.
A co-founder with Cardew of the Scratch Orchestra in 1969—the year after the piece was conceived—White must have imagined, at least in part, an amateur cohort for this music. An interesting irony is that London Sinfonietta’s realisation was anything but amateur: it was, inevitably, virtuosic. With exceptional control and finely tuned coordination, these musicians produced the most musical sounds one could reasonaly expect from glass bottles (imaginably, with a more mixed band of amateurs, the result might drift towards a kind of hushed cacophony with pip-pops). Attacks were imperceptible, in something like a Griseyian dal niente; timbre was perfectly homogeneous. The sounding mass quivered quietly, crawling and swelling, with seconds, thirds, and micro-intervals occasionally floating to the surface. As with Saunders’s large mobile, this is music that thematises what is, in some sense, all music concerned with: perception, space, time, and sound—here treated as something dissectible and traceable, yet still seeping through the room as if following its own will.
Had Grisey been in the audience, he would surely have loved the treatment whereby, as the tide of White’s hoots subsided, the sustained rustles of drum skin that open Quatre chants crept onto the threshold of perception—music of liminality is inherently processual. Between the sobering songs of death, these rustling episodes recurred; time here became palpable in what Grisey calls the “‘impersonal’ form of durations.” A novel aspect of the work lies in the fact that the diverse texts chosen—linked to the death of the angel, civilisation, voice, and humanity—serve as direct sources for Grisey’s memorable sonic forms. Guez-Ricord’s dispersed and repetitive words for the first song, which announce a cessation of the connection between the divine and the human, give rise both to the melody and to the voice “on threshold”: short utterances trapped in mordents, and prolonged vowels that merge with the metallic timbres of flute and trumpet, thanks to the careful coordination between soprano and instrumentalists.
Nina Guo’s charming middle register showcased a near-perfect balance between resonance and “graininess”, and the singing was rich in timbral variation and full of agility. Just as the summery, loose-cut green dress she wore suggested a certain lightness, her interpretative choice, too, seemed a light one: the voice added luminosity and tenderness to the subdued tone and ritualised brutality that characterise much of the piece. This is particularly evident in the song based on texts from Egyptian sarcophagi—the most liturgical-sounding of all—where Guo intoned a largely monotone line in a husky lower-middle range, using loose articulation to mould a voice full of lyricism.
The sound of bells and the shape of waves become sonic archetypes for the music. The arpeggiated micro-intervals in harp and low instruments in the second song recalled tubular bells of a dimmed colour. As the musicologist Jonathan Cross has shown through sketch studies, Grisey was indeed fascinated by the bells of Strasbourg Cathedral around the time he was composing his last works. The simulation of this sound takes on an especially striking “inside-out” quality in D’après Erinna: here the voice is woven into the ensemble’s undulating texture, both deviating from and integrating into the harmonic substance that constitutes the bell sonority. Liminal music invites us to listen from both within and without. This brand of musical thinking find echoes in non-spectralist music—for instance, in Salvatore Sciarrino, who speaks of the liminality of “intra-uterus” listening: hearing both from inside and outside a body, and hearing the body as both a source of sound and the environment it inhabits.
The permeating toll of the bell creates a ritual space—something that becomes especially definitive in the latter half of the piece, where Grisey channels the influence of Tibetan Buddhist music into a narcotic play with the thresholds between rhythm and duration (Faux interlude); the three percussionists’ virtuosity was in the spotlight. Climax arrived in a soaring pitch that Guo held with security—one scream that literally translated a woman’s pain in labour, as Grisey intended—while the ensemble erupted into a micropolyphonic tumult. It was only when the storm subsided and silence reigned again that we realised the whole composition had been about holding an impossibly long breath without knowing it. The only moment in which Grisey introduces a total, albeit temporary, halt comes just before the Berceuse—the gentle lullaby of tomorrow’s hope for a humanity that has just stepped across death. At an assured pace and with resoluteness, Jack Sheen let this moment of standstill work its magic: as if a layer of sound had just been peeled away, the listener—now more curious than ever—restlessly awaited whatever wonder lied bare ahead. Bell sonority resurfaced in the wavy, rocking figures that ensued and steadily unfolded.
“I dare hope that this lullaby will not be among those we sing tomorrow to the first human clones, when we must reveal to them the unbearable genetic and psychological violence inflicted on them by a humanity desperately seeking foundational taboos”, wrote Grisey in his commentary on this last song. At a time when the utopian vision of an art-science has advanced ever further, while belief and truth, once at the heart of any utterance, ebb away beneath an artificially forged fluency, this prescience feels disquieting—perhaps even more so than the work’s supposed prescience about Grisey’s impending death.
What is certain is that Grisey’s liminal sensibility—his proposition of an ecology of music in 1998—continues to have consequences in today’s musical world perhaps greater than he could have envisaged. London Sinfonietta’s revisiting of this magnum opus bore this out through its smart curation and dramaturgy. The music seemed to have neither beginning nor end. Were we listening to four very different pieces written across more than half a century, or simply attending a plenisentient appreciation of a sonic organism that has survived “Vortex temporum”?
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