Present through physical effort and at the same time absent and dissolving
into the very sound he himself produces: a musician belongs to the half-light kingdom.
Low-angled lighting, the freshness of the evening, roads that dissolve in the twilight:
this is this season’s recurrent theme.
NEW PRODUCTIONS
“Piano & String Quartet”
Morton Feldman | Fumyio Ikeda
This “danse de chambre” takes us to the very heart of Morton Feldman’s art: an 80 minute work for piano and strings, radiating a calm light,
where “every something is an echo of nothing”.
The dancer-choreographer Fumiyo Ikeda shares the space with her instrumentalists, as though she were the sixth musician.
No decor, no backstage, no artifice: everything is laid bare.
The inexact repetitions of Ikeda’s movements gently sculpt the space. Feldman’s music does the same with time.
The spectator loses his footing in this interweaving of the familiar and the unexpected where Memory becomes confused, get lost, and finally is defeated.
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Sound & Vision (A Liquid Room)
Hodkinson, Duncan David, Sickle&Leguay, Schubert, Loeffler, Sciarrino, Ablinger, ...
You undoubtely remember our Liquid Rooms involving several stages, abrupt transitions and a club atmosphere? This format facilitates many different ways of listening: from listening “attentively” to “immersive” listening and back and forth between them.
Prepared in several variations for Brussels, Ghent and Nanterre in France, this new edition will take stock of the connections between music and visual performance: the preoccupation of an entire generation of young people, for whom the musical gesture moves between the eye and the ear.
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Jardin des Secrets
Hervé | Verspieren, Bailie, Riley, Feldman | Ikeda, Breathcore
An introductory parcours at the Opéra de Lille which has been transformed into a garden at night. A work involving sounds and plants (Jean-Luc Hervé and the landscape gardener Astrid Verspieren), the sounds of the city musically arranged on a computer (Joanna Bailie), Ikeda/Feldman who we spoke about earlier, Terry Tiley and even a choir of ghosts (with Michael Schmid): far from the daily commotion, everything trembles and sways.
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Laborintus | For Times To Come
With Mike Patton
In Krakow, reunion with our dear Mike Patton.
Face to face, two works which are part of the same historical sequence:
One is politically engaged, joyfully negligent, and energetically mixes serial writing, electronics, jazz:
it is a “machine for making sense” — Luciano Berio, Laborintus II, 1965.
The other has a spiritual orientation, and requires a certain form of asceticism from the musicians, which has them communicating via the musical interpretation of short poems:
it’s an “experience that goes beyond sense” — Karlheinz Stockhausen, For Times To Come, 1969.
Two faces of musical utopias, taken to their very highest level in the second half of the 1960s.
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Wet
Wolfgang Mitterer, Marc Ducret, Cédric Dambrain, Michael Schmid @ BEAF (Bozar)
We were talking about Stockhausen ... Not a single day goes by that we don’t think of that Great Wizard of Sirius, because there is pretty much no domain of musical intervention that he hadn’t thought of first. Microphony considered as one of the Fine Arts, for example: in contrast with electronics that are applied afterwards, microphony tracks down the strange texture of the sound at its source.
Michael Schmid continues this investigation on his flutes, this time with underwater microphones!
In the second half, it’s the return of our dear friend Wolfgang Mitterer, and the prodigious Marc Ducret, followed by Dambrain and his surgical machines.
The mood of the evening: humidity.
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St. John's Eve
Pierluigi Billone, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jürg Frey, Feldman/Ikeda
St. John’s Eve at the Handelsbeurs.
No, not a Bacchanal, but a long, sweet and concentrated vigil, from sunset to sunrise.
Handelsbeurs, Ghent, 17-06-2017
PERFORMANCES ON TOUR
Ghost Notes
Helmut Lachenmann, Fausto Romitelli, Alexander Schubert
Created in collaboration with Maud Le Pladec, this performance for children evokes the hold music has over our human bodies.
Music is a force that is even more powerful than we are — too powerful, sometimes, to the point of scaring us.
And children love to be scared, don’t they?
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The Lichtenberg Figures
Eva Reiter | Ben Lerner
After the concert in Frankfurt one blogger suggested it could be “The Pierrot Lunaire of the 21st century”;
another controversially stated “Bankruptcy of Neue Musik”.
It’s safe to say that everyone has their opinion on Eva Reiter.
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Meyoucycle
Eleanor Bauer | Chris Peck
Hyper-capitalism, tablets, connected bodies:
this is the starting point for this carefully crafted musical comedy.
Through its affirmative power and the excellent redistribution of all the clichés of the genre,
Meyoucycle crosses and overturns the ordinary bitterness of the show of denunciation.
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Vortex Temporum
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker | Gérard Grisey
Raise your hand if you haven’t seen it yet!
Because now’s the time to come back for more:
the inventive power of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s choreographed appropriation of Gérard Grisey’s sextet is truly boundless.
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Rain
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker | Steve Reich
Music for Eighteen Musicians by Steve Reich,
and ten dancers who are truly excelling themselves:
Bojana Cvejic recently referred to Lyotard as
“a vitalistic, machinic and libidinal thought”.
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Concrete
Maud Le Pladec | Michael Gordon
Raise your hand if you haven’t seen it yet! (again).
Le Pladec is the very devil.
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Work Travail Arbeid
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker | Gérard Grisey
Museum version of Vortex Temporum, in transformation throughout the day.
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Drumming
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker | Steve Reich
A beautiful and enigmatic composition that is both obsessive and essential (La Repubblica, 1998)
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Un Sacre du printemps
Daniel Linehan | Igor Stravinsky (The rite of Spring)
Le Monde referred to it as A breath of fresh air.
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IN CONCERT
HOLLIGER
Trio, Tream, Zehn Stücke, Sequenzen...
Life is too short for repetition, dixit Heinz Holliger. Innovatory solo and chamber music for oboe, viola and harp.
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Noir de Noir
Bernhard Gander, Francesco Filidei, John Dowland
Eva Reiter on the viola da gamba, Tom Pauwels on the guitar and vocals by Theresa Dlouhy, for an ode to black bile
— the melancholy pitch, the milk that musicians sup on in secret.
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American Lament
Christopher Trapani, Larry Polansky
Grand ensemble d’abord, duo Pauwels / Van Der Aa ensuite,
Starting with large ensemble, duo Pauwels / Van Der Aa follows on its heels, for this micro-tonal interpretation of the music of the south of the USA.
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Index of Metals
Fausto Romitelli | Paolo Pachini
Fausto Romitelli’s baroque masterpiece,
torn between excessive heroism and a contemplation of the Fall.
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Death Of Light
Jonathan Harvey
“No crucifixion has ever seemed so devastating”,
wrote the composer about Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece,
which is the inspiration behind his quintet in five movements.
From the cry of despair to the painful reassurance of the infinite beauty of the funeral march,
Harvey’s flamboyant mysticism is at its most intense.
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Flute & Viola (Salvatore Sciarrino)
Always very physical, at times suggesting the trace of a lightning flash,
at times a beating heart in the night,
Sciarrino’s music is interested in the secret frequencies of our organic life.
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See you soon!
