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Ensemble Intercontemporain, conductor: Léo Margue

Video Shooting by Jérémie Schellaert at Le Studio of la Philharmonie de Paris.
Sound engeneer Lucas Joseph.

Commissioned by Maison de la Musique Contemporaine
Editions musicales de l'Artchipel

https://www.editiongravis.de/verlag/product_info.php?info=p2966_L-Ange-Chemna-l.html

On Saturday, May 29th at 7:30 p.m. at Palazzo Chigi Saracini, Via di Città, 89, 53100 Siena

AVETIS QUARTET

Anush Nikoghosyan, violin

Carmen Tosunyan, violin

Hayk Ter-Hovhannisyan, viola

Mikayel Navasardyan, cello

MAYA OGANYAN, piano

Quartet No. 2 in D major by Aleksandr Porfir’evič Borodin

Liber Secretorum Henoch for string quartet by Michel Petrossian (Italian premiere)

Quintet No. 2 in A major, Op. 81 by Antonín Dvořák

More information : https://www.chigiana.org/pf/29-maggio-2024/

"Sois l’Ange" is an original creation that offers a dialogue between literature, poetry, music, and contemporary dance. The piece is infused with demanding musical and choreographic writing, delivered by virtuoso performers. Group dances, solo dances, and musical pieces are woven around the texts to lead us, along with all the artists, to the final tutti. The work challenges us on our humanity, confronts us with our choices: to be devil or to be angel.

Address: Aux Échappées Belles, 65 Rue du Bourbonnais - 69009 Lyon 9th

Opening: Saturday, May 25, 2024, at 8 p.m.

Music: Contemporary Orchestral Ensemble

Violin: Gael Rassaert

Violin: Céline Lagoutière

Viola: Aurélie Métivier

Cello: Nicolas Cerveau

Flute: Fabrice Jünger

Dance: Hallet Eghayan Company and Associated Artists

Margot Bain, Émilie Eckly, Anne-Sophie Seguin, Nicola Ayoub

More information: https://yp.events/a1e1f1cf-57ac-4b67-b9eb-7fb38bc11020/Sois-l-ange

Timkat, for ensemble of thirty musicians

Composition : 2024

Commissioned by the Maison de la Musique Contemporaine for the SuperPhoniques for the Ensemble intercontemporain

Publisher: Éditions Musicales Artchipel

Duration: 13 minutes

Photos d'Ethiopie (copyright Frédérique Brulé)

Photos de la répétition avec l'Ensemble Intercontemporain à la Philharmonie, direction : Léo Margue

"Timkat" is inspired by a series of four trips Michel Petrossian made to Ethiopia. From 2016 to 2019, the composer visited major cultural sites, took part in ancestral festivals and met a number of musicians, traditional street performers and professional singers known as däbtärä. He returned from his travels with some twenty short videos, which he used as a narrative framework "to imagine a fresco imbued with the complex sound phenomena observed at the time", he explains. In Bahar Dar, on the shores of Lake Tana, the Timkat festival (honoring the baptism of Christ and celebrated throughout Ethiopia) was like the culmination of his journey.

The richness of this festival, at its most intense, captured the composer's attention: "All the processions, each with its own sound and visual identity, starting from the four corners of the town, converge on the single gathering place - an immense basin filled with water which is poured over all the participants, in a cathartic movement featuring scenes of great popular jubilation and trance-like phenomena".

This celebration, which combines the survival of tribal rites and Christian ceremonies around water as a symbol of life, is a prodigious source of inspiration for the composer, who is enthusiastic about the association between modernity and ancestral traditions: "Confronting two universes that seem to be on opposite ends of the spectrum [...] is to create a collision, the promise of a cognitive dissonance that arouses my desire as a composer".

However, Michel Petrossian's approach is more a questioning of identity than a superficial search for picturesque effects: "It's by no means a simple quest for exoticism, sound illustration or folkloric effects of any kind. Rather, it's a starting point that brings two states of the world into simultaneous presence, in the hope of producing a new meaning, a different sound universe".
Michel Petrossian