COLLISIONS
For its third concert, the Cantus Ensemble presents four compositions: three are works by important authors of contemporary music who have already entered the history of twentieth-century music, and their works show three different and complex approaches to a contemporary sound. With the fourth work, the Ensemble looks to the future: it will premiere a new work by a living author, the Croatian composer Dalibor Bukvić, who will take part in the performance himself, playing the piano.
György Ligeti said of his four-movement Chamber Concerto that this composition “would be a concerto in as much as all thirteen performers are also virtuoso soloists and they are all equally talented”. It is hence a work for thirteen soloists, “and their parts develop simultaneously, but in different rhythmic configurations and usually at different speeds”. Ligeti wrote the composition in 1969 and 1970, for the ensemble Die Reihe.
The Italian composer Luigi Nono wrote the work Incontri in 1955 in Venice, while it had its premiere at the famed International Summer Course in Darmstadt. The composition was written for 24 instruments and is an example of serial music, while the title refers to the Meetings of varied, but complementary structures and the superimposition of layers of sound that are in a constant “conflict”.
The composition Partiels by the French composer Gérard Grisey, a composition for 18 instruments from 1975, the third work in his cycle Acoustic Spaces represents one of the essential works of Spectralism. Gérard Grisey, a student of Messiaen, was the originator of Spectralism, which continued to interest later generations of composers, and is based on the analysis of sounds and on taking the harmonic spectrum – the internal, detailed structure of sound – as the basis for the harmonies performed by an ensemble. The beginning of this composition was particularly influential, in which each of the instruments in the ensemble plays one of the partial tones discovered in the analysis of a single deep tone on the trombone, creating a new brilliant quality of sound.
The Croatian composer Dalibor Bukvić was a "French student" himself, after studying in Zagreb. In France, he also met Grisey and was interested in spectralism music for a while, but then he went his own way, towards the “power and communication of sound” to which he felt closest, and we will learn what approach he has chosen for his new composition on the night of the concert.
