Overview(s)

Concerts 31.01.2022

Two ensembles and two conductors are invited to this premiere concert where the Remix Ensemble, led by its conductor Peter Rundel, alternates with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, led by Lucie Leguay, who is well known to the soloists of the EIC since she was Matthias Pintscher's assistant for two years.

Lucie Leguay is at court to conduct In Zimmern, the piece by Turkish composer Zeynep Gedizlioğlu given its French premiere at the beginning of the evening. At just 45 years of age, Zeynep Gedizlioğlu is multiplying honours and awards, having won the Ernst von Siemens Foundation Composers' Prize in 2012 and the Berliner Kunstpreis of the Akademie der Künstle in Berlin in 2019, where she now lives. Commissioned by theEnsemble Intercontemporain, In Zimmern is based on the book Odalarda by the Turkish writer Erdal Öz. An oriental, detempered melody runs through the piece, with its strange instrumental combinations and bewitching sonorities, such as the treatment of these double reeds (oboe), a little guttural, coming from popular traditions. A tense, almost violent discourse emerges from the percussion like the signals of a latent drama. More fluid and pulsating, the last part seems to initiate a new phase of the narrative, which is cut short rather abruptly.

 The Remix Ensemble is a Portuguese phalanx, founded in 2000 and based in Porto, within the walls of the Casa da Mùsica. It is in the garden and immediately follows, under the direction of Peter Rundel, with the piece by the British Rebecca Saunders, Skin (Peau), created in Paris in 2016 at the German festival of Donaueschingen, by the astonishing English soprano Juliet Fraser and the Klangforum Wien. Saunders emphasises in her note of intent the polysemic richness of the title word that guides her in thinking about timbre and imagining its sonic morphologies. In Skin, the proposals emanate from the voice, a marvellous sound generator ranging from breaths to stammerings, from noisy mouth effects to the most unexpected emissions; let us quote, among other astonishing vocal actions - a micro-lip captures all the finesse - the trickle of sound maintained by the rolls of the tongue in the extreme high register that the soprano makes heard, joining the strokes of light obtained on the accordion. For the instrumental ensemble, including an electric guitar, acts as a "sounding board" for the voice. It is its double, its halo and its deformation/metamorphosis. It follows it like its shadow and more than once gives the illusion of electronic sounds and the magic of their effects. The space opens and closes, becomes animated and frozen according to the singer's postures, sometimes articulating, in an atonal voice, words that we don't understand. The listening is suspended to the future of this exploratory and initiatory journey that moves us. The sounds of the Remix Ensemble are dazzling and the energies fused in a highly virtuoso score whose singular brilliance is restored by Peter Rundel with a rare mastery. The performance of Juliet Fraser, for whom Saunders wrote Skin, is out of the ordinary, always sober and with a virtuoso capacity for her instrument (the source voice that does not just sing) that goes beyond the limits and far beyond!

The idea of bringing together two phalanxes within the same score is not new to Hèctor Parra who, in his opera Das Geopferte Leben (2013) or in Orgia-irrisorio alito d'aria (2017), had already associated a baroque ensemble and a contemporary music ensemble. By summoning two conductors in La mort i la primavera (given in its French premiere), the composer intends to treat these two entities in a complementary as well as autonomous manner: thus the beat of the two conductors is often different and the tempi diverge. Parra draws his inspiration from the last unfinished novel by the Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda, a powerful text in which neither the place nor the time are defined and in which two worlds are opposed: the sectarian ideology that locks up and justifies all the exactions on the one hand, and free thought on the other, the drive to live, desire and love through the two protagonists in love, the son and his mother-in-law, these 'unconscious seditionists', according to Rodoreda.

The instrumental line-up is balanced from one ensemble to the next, with a few idiosyncrasies for each: in the Ensemble Intercontemporain, a bass tuba, double bass and harp are often soloists; in the Remix Ensemble, a double bass and piano are duly highlighted. Low voices are heard in this 'imaginary ballet', as the work is subtitled. A jungle world, harsh and savage, surrounded by the stridency of the piccolo, alternates with a more undulating and consonant flow, a less hostile nature crossed by the effluvia of an almost pastoral oboe. The metallic percussion in tableau II evokes the legendary Niebelungen, while echoes of the Rite of Spring come from IV, between convulsive dance and bursts of lyricism opening up other perspectives. Doesn't the double bass soloist (Nicolas Crosse in the lead) in V embody this "chosen one" (there is a question of ritual in Rodoreda), the one who is sacrificed to the Gods and who must dance until death? The aural spectacle, in which the gesticulations of the two conductors participate, fascinates the eye as much as the ear, musicians and conductors united and concentrated to communicate the fervour of this hallucinated vision.

Michèle Tosi

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