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A full season is coming to an end with its discoveries, its turbulences, 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, joys and emotions, full, numerous, unforgettable, that bring us back together, that reunite us alone and with the others.
So here is music again and again to spend the summer together.
The 100% female playlist of Michèle Tosi
Clara Iannotta (b. 1983): D' après, 2012
The piano is prepared and the props are many, glasses filled with water, music boxes, whistles, harmonic pipes placed within 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 piece, with subtle sonorities, inspired by the sounds of the bells of the Freiburg Cathedral. From the chimes of Clangs (older sister of D'après) only the muffled resonances remain, sound images that the memory reappropriates and that the composer's imagination redraws.
Lara Morciano (born 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 (director of computer music) José Miguel Fernandez. In Liphyria, four transducers (small microphones placed in the piano strings) send information to the computer, which transforms the sound of the instrument live and feeds it back into the speakers, giving birth to a virtual piano, a double shadow of the Steinway. The gloves that Morciano puts on to play his piece are equipped with sensors ensuring the interaction between the piano and the machine. The physical aspect of the playing also comes into play, on the keyboard but also in the strings, scratched with the fingernails, swept in glissando with a plastic card, etc. Liphyra is a butterfly, an insect with complete metamorphosis, which inspired our composer.
To be heard on France Musique.
Claudia Jane Scroccaro (born 1984): I sing the body electric for double bass with Florentin Ginot and electronics (Ircam, 2020)
Claudia Jane Scroccaro is both a composer and a director of computer music, mastering herself the functioning of technological tools, a field she now teaches at Ircam. In I sing the body electric, a piece conceived during her year of Cursus, electronics meets the double bass, that of Florentin Ginot, modeling a process of transformation, distortion, amplification that gives to hear the sounds as if one were inside the double bass. This fusional relationship is refined through operations performed by the performer on his instrument, which he de-tunes while playing, while the electronics "de-tunes the 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 Music 1972)
Fifty years ago - on April 9, 1972 to be exact - Rothko Chapel by Morton Feldman (1926-1987) was performed for the first time in the chapel designed by the American painter Mark Rothko in Houston. It was an opportunity to come and enjoy this work, one of the composer's masterpieces. Written for a soprano, a contralto, a mixed choir, percussion, celesta and viola, this score, at once static and prodigiously animated, takes us to the very edge of silence and to the height of contemplation, until the final cantilena, a moving dialogue between vibraphone and viola.
I discovered it in concert nearly 20 years ago by Les Cris de Paris and the ensemble 2e2m, but on record, I prefer the version recorded by the late Christophe Desjardins - with the Collegium Novum Zurich and the Basler Madrigalisten under the direction of Jonathan Nott - for the Aeon label.
Kali Malone : Living Torch (album Shelter PressPortraits GRM" series, 2022)
At 28 years old, the American Kali Malone, about whom we spoke recently, continues to assert her singularity. Composed and premiered at the GRM in Paris, Living Torch, mixing synthesizers, trombone and bass clarinet, is a two-step plunge into the heart of the sound phenomenon: carried by superhuman basses, Living Torch I is like a slow ascent towards the light; as for Living Torch II, a 4-note motif is gradually caught up in a sound continuum made of fascinating metamorphoses of textures
Gaël Mevel : Le Cercle (CD Label Rives, 2017)
With 4 years delay, I discover with delight this record - whose CD version is an amazing object in a hand-painted sleeve - of cellist Gaël Mevel, composed with 6 other outstanding muisicians-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, the musicians forming a circle around the audience (hence the name of the project), this long piece in three movements is a phantasmatic and zen ode to the Land of the Rising Sun.
The texts of Dominique Masse and Gaël Mevel on the Bandcamp page speak about it much better than I can. But let's say that the last two minutes of the central movement, splendid and impresionist, sum up this poetic enterprise which summons, 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 that, as Bertrand Chamayou puts it, "comes out in one gush and doesn't feel like it lasts two hours.
Meditative and atmospheric, the First Communion of the Virgin, 11th Regard, echoes silence and resonance, and a gentle melancholy comes and goes illustrating a deep 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 from the 11th century, we see 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 old, this young singer has made a dazzling entrance on the musical scene with her own jazz and oriental text songs. Trained on the violin from the age of 4, she was "overwhelmed by voices, by what they reveal about people" and started singing at the age of 8 by listening to Maria Callas, Chavela Vargas, Mercedes Sosa, Janis Joplin or Nina Hagen. Today, she continues to cherish atypical female voices, those who have the audacity to explore unknown territories and forbidden registers. Her deep, rumbling and haunting voice, accompanied by the guitar and surrounded by cellos and violins, reminds us with pleasure, another great voice, that of Barbara.
Hania Rani, Live from Studio S2 (Gondwana Records, 2021)
Recorded live in the emblematic Studio S2, one of the recording studios of the Polish radio in Warsaw, "There is a kind of intimacy when we play the small piano in this huge and also very high room" says Hania Rani. Pianist and composer, born in Gdansk, often awarded, she represents the new face of Polish music, a face that we still know very little in France. Initially inspired by the study of classical music, she was introduced to jazz and electronics, and as she says: "mixing Chopin and Schostakovitch with Dave Brubeck and Moderat". Live from Studio S2 is a breathtaking minimalist performance for two pianos.
