RE:INCARNATIONS — CHAMBER CONCERT

The eponymous “reincarnations” are a metaphor for music that, escaping the weight of matter, is able to record in sound the elusive — to curve space, suspend time, evoke the breath of nature, move mythological shadow, evoke a dream vision, repaint the barely perceptible movement of light on water.

Together with the artists and performers of the concert, we invite you to a contemplative, purifying story woven between sound, image and word, the idea of which is to create a space of attentive listening. Its musical protagonists will be flutes and harp — instruments perfectly illustrating with their sound these transitional states: between waking and sleeping, breath and phrase, contemplation and distraction, finally European tradition and cultures of other continents.

In Claude Debussy's Syrinx, the lone flute becomes the voice of myth — a tale of desire, flight, fear and transformation. A free, almost improvised narrative is arranged in a series of breaths and impressions, in which the most important thing becomes color, suspension, allusion. Another mythological trope is taken by Daniel Schnyder in the composition Teiresias for piccolo flute and harp. The figure of the Theban herald, existing between masculinity and femininity, light and darkness, visible and hidden, finds its reflection in the tense dialogue of the instruments: the piercing piccolo and the softly resonating harp. In L'Aube enchantée by Ravi Shankara, the music opens up to the spirituality of the East and the idiom of raga. It is a sound image of the transition of night into day: from focus and meditative calm to an increasingly clear pulse. In Ian Clarke's Winged Brocade, the two flutes weave their voices together in a lyrical, nuanced dialogue, reminiscent of an ornate, ethereal and flickering fabric.

Arvo Pärta's Spiegel im Spiegel, which opens the second part of the concert, brings a moment of complete stoppage — almost disembodied music, in which the recurring sounds create the impression of infinite reflection. In the last two compositions, nature returns no longer as a symbol, but as a full-fledged space of imagination. In Bernard Andrès' Algues suite, the music evokes the flow and swaying of water, the flickering of light and the melancholy of a moment that disappears before we can name it. The final Scènes de la forêt by Mel Bonis are an invitation to a forest world stretched between sleepy stillness and ritual energy. It is a painterly, sensual and at the same time separate music — like the composer herself, whose work has been unjustly pushed to the far margins for many years.

Photo by Basia Sinica