Category Archives: 4. Great Ensemble: Orchestra

2. Cycle: Les Princesses / The Princesses, 4. Great Ensemble: Orchestra, 8. For dancing

La Forêt – The forest (I* – II–III–IV*–V*–VI–VII et VIII) (Les princesses) (2008)

For 2 saxophones, 2 clarinets, Trumpet, French horn, trombone, 2 percussions, piano, string quintet (2 violins, viola, cello and double bass) and electronics in 6 channels.

For choreographies by Carolyn Carlson (Larrio Ekson), Graciela Martinez, Jackie Taffanel, Blanca Li, (Nathalie Pernette et Laurent Falguieras), Héla Fatoumi, Jackie Taffanel 2, Elsa Wolliaston, et final (tutti).

Photos: Arthur Péquin

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4. Great Ensemble: Orchestra, 5. Solo instrument /with or without electronics, All the compositions

SOMBRAS DE ALUCINACIONES Y MUERTE (1988/89)

SHADOWS OF HALLUCINATIONS AND DEATH (1988/89)

For cello and orchestra

Photo by Ioh Hindioh

The composition is an homage to selk’nam people, a tribe that inhabited Southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego (Spanish for Land of Fire), and whose last survivor died in 1998. Nowadays erased from the repertoire of humanity, this culture is still alive only through very few recorded documents and some cave paintings. Voluntarily, I did not want to exhume these musical fragments for writing the piece, but rather take these fragments to create a new language that could have belonged to them. I wanted to create a relation to the auditory space, the harmonic and timbral universe in which the emotion of the sound is the main concern. From this extra-musical (or extremely musical!) idea, the dialectic that establishes the structure of the piece is born. Beyond wanting to bring attention to a mystic and philosophical reflection, I have wanted to highlight lyricism and poetry over emotion.

Opposition and complement principles between the soloist and the orchestra are present throughout the whole composition. The orchestra many times is an image, a shadow, just like the hallucination the soloist has. By becoming autonomous, the shadow emerges from the imaginary world into the real world. This work reproduces, through the solo/orchestra dialectics the shape of a reinvented ritual.

[ Great ensemble / Orchestra ]

[ Solo instrument / with or without electronics ]

4. Great Ensemble: Orchestra

3 New York Blues (2011)

For mezzosoprano and ensemble.

With projection of auditory and visual images regarding New York City on texts from Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe.

Commissioned by Radio France

3 New York Blues
3 New York Blues

The composition is based on a strange bet: to write about a city I had never been to. The idea of New York “blues” is not less strange for me. This situation allowed me to have a faraway vision, detached from that city.

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4. Great Ensemble: Orchestra

Around the Bell (2011)

For an ensemble of 14 musicians

Commissioned by Studio for New Music Ensemble

Premiered on 26th January 2012 in the Rachmaninov hall of the Tchaïkovsky of Moscow.

 

The work is an answer to a project that involved asking several composers to take a theme related to Russia as an inspiration for a series of exchanges with Western Europe. My admiration for russian musicians and writers boosted the modesty that led me to incline towards a cinematography character.

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4. Great Ensemble: Orchestra, 6. Chamber music

Ex Lex (Teatro secreto) (2012)

For chamber orchestra

Ex lex is divided into five movements, in which the first and the second as well as the fourth and the fifth are linked. It was composed during 2011 and part of 2012 and it is commissioned by the Ensemble Contrechamps of Ginebra, which specializes in music from the XX and XXI century.

The title, in latin, from the law, about the law.

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4. Great Ensemble: Orchestra, All the compositions

Quebrada / Horizonte (2015)

for Orchestra

Commissioned by the Orchestre Philharmonique of Radio France for the Festival Présences 2015.

The title of the work could be translated as Break/Horizon. The meaning of Quebrada is literally « Break » but also fault, rift (the Quebrada is a typical landscape of the Andes, commonly translated by Canyon).

The work could also be resumed as the typography \ __., which means a slightly inclined verticality and a flat horizon.

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