Season 2009-2010

References to images, painting and colour often occur in music.

Luca francesconi explains that in Impulse II, he attempted to reproduce as nearly as possible the gestures of a painter. His piece, which has a large over-arching structure, relates a transformative process. This brilliant, colourful, youthful piece opens with great energy, which resolves into a long rallentando in time and space.

Although Fernand Léger's paintings « Les disques », « La roue rouge » and « Élément mécanique » were not a direct source of inspiration for Annette Mengel, they give an idea of the linear and circular shapes she hoped to incorporate into Foggy Swing. Linear time is concretised in this piece through groups of lengthening and shortening durations. The directionality of the process is underscored by recurring ascending lines on a fixed non-octaviante scale. The circular movements suggest "swing", an indefinable, rather mysterious notion that comes from jazz and is difficult to pin down in musical notation. The rhythmically precise demands it makes on the performers approach the effects produced by virtuoso jazz players. The term "foggy" refers to colour, which in this piece is largely cloudy, muddy, and rough, and rarely tender or pastel-like. The colour remains dark, hindering joy and underscoring the impossibility of escape...

Colour and timbre are also the central points around which Kaija Saariaho's works turn.
In « Cendres », a piece based on material from her double concerto for flute, cello and orchestra, two oscillating attitudes create musical tension. In one case the instrumental writing makes the instruments sound as if they closely resemble each other in terms of pitch, rhythm, articulation and colour. In the other case each is used in terms of its most idiomatic characteristics. The composer, poised on the knife's edge of the two possibilities, is conscious of the multiplicity of choices they offer in passing from one perception to the next.

The same reference to crossing the threshold into the realm of the visual is made by Ivan Fedele in Immagini da Escher, a piece which refers to the drawings of Maurits Cornuelis Escher. Escher's works pose the problem of the passage of perception from one object to another.
Immagini da Escher is inspired by mathematical, geometric and figurative principles. Escher often used Möbius's geometric representations, especially his famous strips, to create multidimensional visual paradoxes and images seemingly with no beginning or end and without spatial meaning. The piece, based on these speculations, was written as a commentary on Möbius, and provides numerous imaginative suggestions on how geometrical and figurative meaning can be transferred into the aesthetic and poetic dimension of sound. It is divided into intersecting sections with imperceptible seams, and its dialectic stems from fusion and disintegration. The piece undergoes a perpetual process of transformation and was conceived without beginning or end. It is simply a series of moments in a continuous flow that the composer observes from time to time.

Information :
Théâtre de Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, Place Georges Pompidou, BP 317 Montigny-le-Bretonneux, 78054 Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines
Free entrance - Reservation by tel 01 30 96 99 00 or email accueilarobasetsqy.org
Access map : http://www.theatresqy.org/

Coproduction : Festival Ile de decouvertes - Ensemble Court-circuit, with the support of Renew Music Project.