ConcertPulse
Filters
One instrument crops up with striking frequency in French music: the harp. Magdalena Hoffmann, in Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane, invokes this special Debussyan inflection on her instrument, joined by a string quartet. She also creates a close but delicate exchange with the violin in Camille Saint-Saëns’s Fantaisie. But no less essential to the special French sound is the flute: when it enters an intimate dialogue with the viola in Ibert’s Interludes, the conversation takes place against the undulating ground of a harp. Wave-like arpeggios for the harp are also heard in Quintet for Harp, Flute, Violin, Viola and Cello by the composer and admiral Jean Cras, a work perhaps inspired by his long journeys at sea. The 20th-century music of Cras, Debussy and Ibert receives an exciting contemporary counterpart in Guillaume Connesson’s String Quartet, composed in 2008.
One instrument crops up with striking frequency in French music: the harp. Magdalena Hoffmann, in Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane, invokes this special Debussyan inflection on her instrument, joined by a string quartet. She also creates a close but delicate exchange with the violin in Camille Saint-Saëns’s Fantaisie. But no less essential to the special French sound is the flute: when it enters an intimate dialogue with the viola in Ibert’s Interludes, the conversation takes place against the undulating ground of a harp. Wave-like arpeggios for the harp are also heard in Quintet for Harp, Flute, Violin, Viola and Cello by the composer and admiral Jean Cras, a work perhaps inspired by his long journeys at sea. The 20th-century music of Cras, Debussy and Ibert receives an exciting contemporary counterpart in Guillaume Connesson’s String Quartet, composed in 2008.
Wolfgang Rihm’s work is pervaded by “lines of force”, such as a passion for literature and the visual arts, and often by borrowing from his own music. Earlier pieces are reworked and overwritten without being discarded. A crucial role on this labyrinthine path through time is played by lines, both written and performed: “I love the convoluted web of lines in orchestra’s potential”, he explains. “They are the intertwining grids on which I’ve been working for years”. In Die Stücke des Sängers, Orpheus is torn apart and his lyre is smashed. But new things emerge from the destruction, for his harp continues to play: “Everything I’ve brought forth by way of music I owe to a life, not to a strategy, theory or experiment. It has always been life itself.”
