Saturday 4 October at 8 p.m.

Teatro Piccolo Arsenale

Knussen / Bedford / Anderson / Grisey

chamber orchestra

Oliver Knussen, Coursing for chamber orchestra with 14 musicians (1979, 6’)

Luke Bedford, Man Shoots Strangers from Skyscraper for eight musicians (2002, 6') Italian premiere

Julian Anderson, Alhambra Fantasy for ensemble with 16 musicians (1999/2000, 15’) Italian premiere

Gérard Grisey, Quatre Chants pour franchir le Seuil for soprano and 15 instruments (1996/98, 40’)

soprano Valdine Anderson

conductor Diego Masson

London Sinfonietta

Among the most prestigious and dynamic orchestras to have contributed, over 40 years of activity, to the creation of so many pages of contemporary music, is the London Sinfonietta, protagonist of this concert at the Teatro Piccolo Arsenale. The prestigious orchestra today has plenty of fans and each of its concepts is an event followed by as vast a public as it is varied, thanks to a vision of the contemporary that in the name of research embraces electronic, jazz, folk, placing John Cage next to Aphex Twin, Varèse and Stockhausen to Squarepusher. As it has recently done in concerts and CDs resulting from the collaboration with Warp Records, an independent British label that is a point of reference are those interested in electronic experimentation, acid house and techno.

Julian Anderson, Gerard Grisey, Oliver Knussen, Luke Bedford are the other composers offered for an evening with perhaps the most famous British orchestra in the world.

Considered one of the greatest talents of his generation, Julian Anderson (1967), a pupil of Oliver Knussen, wrote Alhambra Fantasy on commission for the London Sinfonietta, which performed it for the first time in 2001.

“What makes Anderson’s music so special? asks Geoff Brown in The Times in his review of the release of the Alhambra Fantasy CD containing five pieces by the British composer, including his first composition, Diptych, of 1990, with which he won the Royal Philharmonic Society prize (1992) and was admitted into the International Rostrum of Composers of Paris (1996). “His imagination is acute and knowledgeable”, continues the British critic, “the breadth of his inspiration immense. He has not thrown away his former fascination for melody and harmonic certainties, but it has been revitalised by a modern context. The history of classical music; world music and folk music; the club scene; the “spectral” movement of the French avant-garde panorama: Anderson nourishes himself from all of this in these works, creating an often complicated structure that is rendered so light it seems to fly”.

Quatre Chants pour franchir le Seuil, written by Gérard Grisey (1946-1998) in the year of his premature death, and for this reason considered a prophetic piece, will also be performed.

Even though he was subsequently the first to distance himself from it, Grisey remains the champion of spectral music, which investigates sound from a physical and acoustic point of view, exploring the spectrum ranging from harmonic sound to noise, together with the travelling companions with whom he founded the Ensemble l’Itinéraire colon Tristan Murail, Roger Tessier, Michael Levinas, Hugues Dufourt.