According to comments in the score, L’heure de s’enivrer describes a three-stage arc from one emotional state to another: ‘First with contained intensity…which is gradually released…and then, almost with exultation.’ The use of qualifiers is revealing – contained; gradually; almost. This is music that steps back from bold statements, preferring caution and deliberate imprecision. Giguère explores such states in other pieces too, composing with densities, degrees of focus and points in time. The piece shares its title – ‘time to drink’ with a book by the well-known Canadian cosmologist Hubert Reeves, a meditation on the meaning of the universe in the age of nuclear weaponry. Could consciousness, having taken 15 billion years to emerge, really eradicate itself in a matter of minutes? It could be said that Giguère’s piece is a single-minded in its trajectory as the universe itself. At its start there is a division between strings, who play with practice mutes; and the rests, who play bundled melodies circling around a few notes, combining to create cluster chords, very quietly. It is a model of controlled chaos, yet when the strings remove their mutes the two halves start to come together, increasing in volume and coming closer to rhythmic unison. The music rises in register until the final pages, when it suddenly doubles in speed; from here to the end the orchestra moves joyfully as one. ‘Intelligence is not necessarily a poisoned chalice,’ Reeves concludes. ‘The absurd is still avoidable. The awakening of jubilation is, perhaps, the most effective antidote - Tim Rutherford-Johnson