)
A full season comes to an end, with its discoveries, its turbulence, its emotions and its regrets; regrets for not having seen more concerts, listened to more records, regrets for not having paid more attention to what was playing nearby or not having looked further than our familiar horizons. But also, and above all, full, numerous, unforgettable joys and emotions that bring us back together, that reunite us, that bring us together alone and with others.
So here's to more and more music to spend the summer together.
Michèle Tosi's 100% feminine playlist
Clara Iannotta (b. 1983): D' après, 2012
The piano is prepared and accessories are plentiful: glasses filled with water, music boxes, whistles and harmonic pipes are placed within easy reach of the seven instrumentalists in D'après by Italian composer Clara Iannotta, who likes to forge her material beyond traditional lutherie. D'après is a delicate, subtle-sounding piece inspired by the sounds of the bells in Freiburg Cathedral. All that remains of the chimes of Clangs ( D'après's older sister) are muffled resonances, sound images that memory reappropriates and that the composer's imagination redraws.
Lara Morciano (b. 1968): Liphyra
Liphyra by Lara Morciano is a piece for "augmented" piano, adopting the format of France Musique's Alla Breve/World Premiere. Composer and pianist Lara Morciano is an adept of live electronics, an exploratory attitude she shares with her collaborator and RIM (réalisateur en informatique musicale) José Miguel Fernandez. In Liphyria, four transducers (small microphones placed in the piano strings) send information to the computer, which transforms the instrument's sound live and feeds it back into the speakers, giving birth to a virtual piano, a double shadow of the Steinway. The gloves Morciano wears to play his piece are fitted with sensors to ensure interaction between piano and machine. The physical aspect of the playing also comes into play, on the keyboard but also in the strings, scratched with fingernails, swept in glissando with a plastic card, etc. Liphyra is a butterfly, an insect in complete metamorphosis, which inspired our composer.
To be heard on France Musique.
Claudia Jane Scroccaro (b. 1984): I sing the body electric for double bass with Florentin Ginot and electronics (Ircam, 2020).
Claudia Jane Scrocarro is both a composer and a producer of computer music, mastering the workings of technological tools herself, a field she now teaches at Ircam. In I sing the body electric, a piece conceived during her Cursus year, electronics meets Florentin Ginot's double bass, shaping a process of transformation, distortion and amplification that makes sounds sound as if they were inside the double bass. This fusional relationship is refined through operations performed by the performer on his instrument, which he detunes as he plays, while the electronics "detune space", in a sensual shift of frequencies with sonorities as fragile as they are colorful.
David Sanson's summer playlist
Morton Feldman: RothkoChapel (CD Aeon/Outhere Music1972)
50 years ago - on April 9, 1972 to be precise - Rothko Chapel by Morton Feldman (1926-1987) was performed for the first time in the chapel designed by American painter Mark Rothko in Houston. An opportunity to come and recharge your batteries with this work, one of the composer's masterpieces. Written for soprano, contralto, mixed choir, percussion, celesta and viola, this score is both static and prodigiously animated, drawing us to the very edge of silence and the height of contemplation, right up to the final cantilena, a moving dialogue between vibraphone and viola.
I discovered it in concert nearly 20 years ago with Les Cris de Paris and the 2e2m ensemble, but on record, I prefer the version recorded by the late Christophe Desjardins - with the Collegium Novum Zurich and the Basler Madrigalisten conducted by Jonathan Nott - for the Aeon label.
Kali Malone: Living Torch (album Shelter PressPortraits GRM" series, 2022 )
At 28 years of age, American Kali Malone continues to assert her singularity. Composed and premiered at GRM in Paris, Living Torch, featuring synthesizers, trombone and bass clarinet, is a two-stage plunge into the heart of sonic phenomena: buoyed by superhuman bass, Living Torch I resembles a slow ascent into the light; as for Living Torch II, a 4-note motif is gradually drawn into a sonic continuum of fascinating textural metamorphoses.
Gaël Mevel: Le Cercle (CD Label Rives2017)
4 years late, I'm delighted to discover this album - the CD version of which is a stunning object in a hand-painted sleeve - by cellist Gaël Mevel, composed with 6 other outstanding musician-improvisers (Jacques Di Donato, Thierry Waziniak, Nicolas Nageotte, Jean-Luc Cappozzo, Diemo Schwarz and Daniel Lifermann). Recorded live at the Maison de la culture du Japon in Paris, with the musicians forming a circle around the audience (hence the name of the project), this long three-movement piece is a fantastical, Zen-like ode to the Land of the Rising Sun.
The texts by Dominique Masse and Gaël Mevel on the Bandcamp page describe it much better than I can. But let's just say that the last two minutes of the central movement, splendid and impresionistic, sum up this poetic undertaking, which summons up, in no particular order, "the cinema of Ozu, that of Kurosawa, Bach, Debussy, traditional Japanese music, Duke Ellington, Ravel, Gershwin, the laughter of Bibi Anderson, the voice of Jeanne Moreau"...
Sandrine Maricot Despretz's playlist
Olivier Messiaen, Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus : Première communion de la Vierge by Bertrand Chamayou (Warner Music, June 3, 2022)
Composed in 1944, Olivier Messiaen's Vingt regards is considered a twentieth-century piano masterpiece which, as Bertrand Chamayou puts it, "comes out in one go and doesn't feel like two hours".
Meditative and atmospheric, the Première communion de la Vierge, 11th regard, echoes silence and resonance, and a gentle melancholy ebbs and flows illustrating a profound spirituality. " More than in any of my previous works, I have sought here a language of mystical love, at once varied, powerful and tender, sometimes brutal, with multicolored ordinances," explains Olivier Messiaen. Recorded at the Abbaye du Ronceray, in a building dating back to the 11th century, it shows the French pianist with his original score, on which he played at the age of nine.
Clara Ysé, Le monde s'est dédoublé (EP published by Tomboy Lab, 2019)
At just 30 years of age, this young singer has made a dazzling entry onto the music scene with her own brand of jazz and oriental text songs. Trained on the violin from the age of 4, she was "overwhelmed by voices, by what they reveal about human beings" and took up singing at the age of 8, listening to Maria Callas, Chavela Vargas, Mercedes Sosa, Janis Joplin and Nina Hagen over and over again. Today, she continues to cherish atypical female voices, those bold enough to explore unknown territories and forbidden registers. Her deep, rumbling, haunting voice, accompanied on guitar and surrounded by cellos and violins, is a pleasant reminder of another great voice, that of Barbara.
Hania Rani, Live from Studio S2 (Gondwana Records, 2021)
Recorded live in the emblematic Studio S2, one of Polish radio's recording studios in Warsaw, "there's a kind of intimacy when you play the little piano in this huge, high room", says Hania Rani. Born in Gdansk, this award-winning pianist and composer represents the new face of Polish music, a face we still know very little about in France. Initially inspired by the study of classical music, she was introduced to jazz and electronics, and as she puts it: "mixing Chopin and Schostakovich with Dave Brubeck and Moderat". Live from Studio S2 is a breathtaking minimalist performance for two pianos.
