Poésie augmentée – C-E. Cella / M. Lupone – Festival Milano Musica – Milano, Italia
With an instrumentarium of unique timbres, the Percussions de Strasbourg have always worked to expand their sound palette and are delighted with their new collaboration with two wonderful Italian composers and researchers, specialists in augmented instruments.
After Inside-Out (2017) and Kore (2019), dedicated to the Percussions de Strasbourg, and Dendrum (2021), Carmine-Emanuele Cella will have the opportunity to compose Kobi, the last piece of his cycle “les Espaces Physiques”.
Kobi is a piece for a solo percussionist, written for an augmented mbira and metal plates. The instrumentalist will be placed in the middle of the audience and the sound produced will be diffused on the metal plates installed around the audience.
Michelangelo Lupone, creator of the Feed-Drum©, proposes a duet for two percussionists, À Corps Perdu, composed for this augmented bass drum (sensitive to the speed, pressure and direction of the performer’s gestures) and metal percussions. The work explores the modalities of vibrations of skin and metal, to the point of revealing their most intimate characteristics.
In this program, the Percussions de Strasbourg let themselves be carried away by the technological poetry of two composers with singular worlds.
Minh-Tâm Nguyen and Thibaut Weber, soloists of the Percussions de Strasbourg
Concerts on May 22, 2022, at 7pm and 9:30pm
informations and reservations
Timelessness – Thierry de Mey – Lausanne Opera House, Switzerland
As part of the Percussions Festival International de Lausanne, the Percussions de Strasbourg will present the piece by Belgian composer Thierry De Mey, Timelessness, composed for and with the Strasbourg ensemble. The piece is a genuine showcase for the body in musical practice, giving its performers “visibility” and integrating the exhibition of their gestures and postures into its writing.
A true musical and choreographic mix!
Concert on June 18, 2022 at 7pm at the Lausanne Opera House, Switzerland
infos and reservation
100 cymbals / But what about the noise of crumpling paper… – R.Ikeda / J.Cage – GRAME , Pôle Pixel, Villeurbanne
One evening, ten percussionists, one hundred cymbals for a show that mixes visual, conceptual and musical performance. Or when, from abstraction and pure sound, light and harmony are born.
A simple brass and bronze disc, used more to underline a strong moment than to take center stage, the cymbal plays the leading role here! Created in 2019 in Los Angeles, 100 cymbals allows the multitude of harmonic layers of the instrument to emerge. A key figure in electronic music and art, composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda is known for mixing physical phenomena with mathematical notions. As for the Percussions de Strasbourg, since their creation in 1962, they have been one of the leading groups in contemporary music.
John Cage‘s But what about the noise of crumpling paper… celebrates the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dada co-founder Hans Arp, and was composed in 1986 for Les Percussions de Strasbourg. But Cage did not specify the number of players, the durations, the tempo, or the repetitions. There is only a system of five different punctuation marks that must be reinterpreted for each performance. The Japanese sound and video artist Ryoji Ikeda has created a new version of this conceptual score.
Concerts on June 24 at Studio 24 of the Pôle Pixel in Villeurbanne, as part of the GRAME
infos and reservation
Release of the CD-Booklet Pleiades & Persephassa, Iannis Xenakis
PLEIADES & PERSEPHASSA, IANNIS XENAKIS
The story of an exceptional encounter between a composer and a group of performers.
“Through these two pieces and their richness, we have an incredibly open and wide range of play and appropriation for the performer. In Persephassa, the performer is an element of a relentless mechanic, subject to a controlled structure; in Pleiades, the performer is an actor of events, embodying and carrying them in this inexorable movement that pushes us forward. But whether it is for one piece or another, the pleasure of playing, of the sound and of the group are the same, and beyond the pieces themselves, it is above all what we hear in this interpretation carried by the Percussions de Strasbourg, this recording alone being able to define what this ensemble is in its cohesion, its desire, its imagination, its enthusiasm, its talent.
Between the 1970s with its historic recordings and today, there is finally only one more step, a step added to those of the four generations who have participated in this crazy adventure, one more step like a relay passed from generation to generation, if only to ensure that the movement initiated by all the composers who have written for the Percussions de Strasbourg, and in the forefront of whom is Iannis Xenakis, never stops.”
Jean Geoffroy