Lettura – Fermata

Swiss composer Caroline Charrière was a trained flutist and choir conductor. Since the premiere of her work «Vox Aeterna» for narrator, female choir and orchestra in 1993, composing took on an increasingly important role in her life. In 2000, the musician finally decided to make composition her main focus. The sextet «Papillons de Lumière» is one of her last works before she died in 2018 after a long illness.

Canadian composer Thierry Tidrow describes his «Vier Elementarphantasien as scenes of gallows humour-filled catastrophes based on poems by Christian Morgenstern. The virtuoso duo «Die Flamme» is tailor-made for soprano Sarah Maria Sun. The musical theatre elements suit her and her duo partner, clarinettist Toshiko Sakakibara, perfectly. With this duo, the Phoenix Ensemble will experience a «miniature opera» that does justice to the profound texts of Munich poet Christian Morgenstern.

Canadian composer Claude Vivier writes about the work «Lettura di Dante»:
«Lettura di Dante», based on texts from Dante's «La divina commedia» was composed in Cologne in 1973/74 and is based on a melody with six cells of one, two or three notes, which are constantly repeated and slightly modified in the soprano. This melody, along with all its transpositions and reflections, was then combined into a long twelve-part counterpoint, the parts of which are rhythmically articulated in augmentation and diminution. This counterpoint gives rise to a «timbre melody», which, performed by six instruments, becomes a counterpoint to the original melody. [...] This music is dedicated to Peter Eötvös, a musician from the Stockhausen group whom I met during my stay in Cologne, and tends towards a new sensibility that I have always perceived since my birth among marginalised people, the «bums» or clochards (in Montreal, «robineaux»). Also this beauty and purity that old people and children evoke in me, or this closeness to death that my father and mother always imposed on me. The vision of an unattainable world in a life where money and power determine everything. A life full of loneliness. It is above all these lonely people, which we all are, that I think of when I write. I no longer think about the «future» or the «past», but rather about a kind of vanished present, a kind of intangible joy mixed with the sadness of a child who has lost his mother.»
(Claude Vivier – 1974)

Hungarian composer Péter Eötvös writes about his work «Fermata»:
«Fermata» (2020/21) is a concerto for 15 musicians who sit/stand one and a half metres apart. They present a kind of chronicle of our Covid days and pandemic years, in which normal life suddenly comes to a standstill, then continues somewhat chaotically, only to be halted again by tragic events.
The social tensions that have been growing for centuries seem to have lit the fuse. The question is: how long is the fuse and how quickly or slowly will it cause the bomb to explode?
Such thoughts swirl around in the composer's head as he writes the notes, feeling more like the notes are writing him. (Peter Eötvös – 2021)

With

Sarah Maria Sun (soprano); Ensemble Phoenix Basel; Jürg Henneberger (Musical Director)

Program

Caroline Charrière (1960–2018): «Papillons de Lumière» (2017) for 6 instruments

Thierry Tidrow (*1986): «Die Flamme» (2017) for soprano and clarinet from «Four Elementary Fantasies» (2017–2020)

Claude Vivier (1948–1983): «Lettura di Dante» (1974) for soprano and 7 instruments

Péter Eötvös (1944–2024): «Fermata» (2021) for ensemble

Info

7:00 p.m. Introduction to the concert with Jürg Henneberger

Duration

60 minutes, no break

Links

→ ensemble-phoenix.ch