Cantus Ansambl
Cantus cycle
 
 

The Cantus Ensemble Concert Cycle /32nd MBZ

13/02/2023
 
 
The Cantus Ensemble Concert Cycle /32nd MBZ  

COLLISIONS

 
The Cantus Ensemble Concert Cycle 2022/2023
February 13th 2023, Monday, Small Hall - Vatroslav Lisinski Concert Hall, 8 pm 
 
Ivan Josip Skender, conductor
 
György Ligeti, Chamber concerto, for 13 instruments 
Luigi Nono, Incontri, for 24 instruments
Gérard Grisey, Partiels, for 18 musicians 
Sanja Drakulić, Taboo, for chamber ensemble, first performance
 
The Cantus Ensemble will present four compositions at their third concert: three pieces by prominent contemporary music authors who have already become a part of 20th-century music history; authors whose work demonstrates three diverse but complex approaches to modern sounds. The ensemble's fourth piece looks into the future: a new piece by a renowned and living female author will be first performed.
 
György Ligeti describes his four-movement Chamber concert as a composition that is "inasmuch a concert as all thirteen performers are equally good virtuoso soloists." Therefore, it is a piece for thirteen solos, "whose parts develop simultaneously, yet in various rhythmic configurations at mostly different speeds." Ligeti wrote the piece between 1960 and 1970 for Die Reihe Ensemble.
 
Italian composer Luigi Nono wrote the composition Incontri in Venice in 1955, first performed at the famous International Darmstadt Summer Course. Its title refers to Encounters of different yet complementary structures and superimposed sound layers in a constant 'clash'. The composition was written for 24 instruments, and it is an exemplary piece of serial music.
 
Partials, a 1975 composition by the French author Grisey is one of the seminal pieces of spectralism, a composition for 18 instruments and his third work in the Acoustic Spaces (Les Espaces Acoustiques) cycle. Gérard Grisey, a student of Olivier Messiaen, was the founder of spectralism, which continued to spark the interest of future generations of composers. Spectralism is grounded in sound analysis and considers the harmonic spectrum – internal, detailed sound structure – as the foundation of harmonies performed by an ensemble. In that regard, the initial part of this very piece was quite influential, as each of the ensemble instruments plays one of the partial tones found in the analysis of the only deep trombone tone, thus creating a new shiny timbre. 
 
Croatian pianist and composer Sanja Drakulić was educated in Zagreb and Moscow, and now she teaches in Osijek. It is as if she is composing the new Cantus Ensemble piece for her upcoming milestone birthday. Writing about Sanja Drakulić ten years ago, on the occasion of her golden 50th birthday, Đurđa Otržan called her a stylistically "complete expressionist" and  “a captain of a ship which constantly sails and observes, picks and awakens new landscapes."
 
 
 
Cantus Ansambl
kontakt@cantus-ansambl.hr   |   www.hds.hr
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Concert cycle Cantus Ansambl is supported by City of Zagreb and international activities by Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia.



Cantus Ansambl