A rare blend of rigor, beauty, and anti-ideological originality distinguishes the music of Henri Dutilleux, whose relatively small output contains boundless harmonic vistas. Born in Angers, France, in 1916, Dutilleux served in World War II before returning to Paris, where he taught, arranged, conducted, and composed. His sensual 1948 Piano Sonata, written for pianist Geneviève Joy, his wife, was the first piece he neither renounced or destroyed. His major orchestral works, from his 1951 Symphony No. 1 to the Van Gogh-inspired Timbres, espace, mouvement from 1978, harness structure and symmetry to convey distinctive musical worlds in colorful harmonic flux. Marcel Proust’s writing had a profound influence on Dutilleux’s meditations on time and memory, such as Mystère de l’instant, a 1989 collection of miniature movements, and The Shadows of Time, a 1997 orchestral work that includes three boys who channel Holocaust victims to ask, in French, “Why us?” Fascinated by the play of virtuosity and form, he wrote 1970’s Tout un monde lointain… for cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and 1985’s L’arbre des songes for violinist Isaac Stern. A famous perfectionist and habitual reviser, he assiduously studied string quartets by Beethoven and Webern before writing his own: Ainsi la nuit (1973-76). Yet there is nothing derivative about Dutilleux’s work, which remains as passionately individual as classical music gets.