SALZBURG CONTEMPORARY • DALBAVIE • ORF RADIO-SYMPHONIEORCHESTER WIEN

Salzburger Festspiele
various, Salzburg, Austria
Austria
ttel.: +43-662-8045-500
http://www.salzburgfestival.at/

Cornelius Meister, Conductor
Philippe Jaroussky, Countertenor
ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien

One part of the series Salzburg contemporary is dedicated to the French composer Marc-André Dalbavie, whose opera Charlotte Salomon will have its world premiere at the Felsenreitschule this year. Dalbavie, born in 1961 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, began his career among the practitioners of Musique spectrale. This movement, also known as Spectralism, began to leave the approaches of serial music behind, turning instead towards the individual tone and analyzing its sound spectrum. Dalbavie, whose teachers included Tristan Murail (represented by his work Winter Fragments (2002) at Klangforum Wien’s concert), typically uses a compositional approach he himself calls ‘morphing’: musical subjects – scales, a chord, a sound field, a rhythmic or melodic figure – develop from each other or evolve into each other, overlapping and resulting in ever-new forms.
Like Stravinsky, whose Octet turned purposefully to the music of past centuries in 1922, marking the beginning of the phase of his output called ‘neo-classicism’, Marc-André Dalbavie makes frequent reference to past epochs. His piece Melodia (2008) for mixed ensemble is based on sound gestures found in Gregorian chant. In Palimpseste (2002) he superimposes his own writing on a madrigal by Carlo Gesualdo which continues to be heard in multiple ways, affecting Dalbavie’s music while being influenced and transformed by the latter. Dalbavie has also explored traditional genres, for example in his Quatuor à cordes, his string quartet from 2012 which will be performed by the Gringolts Quartet. Over the course of the years, he has written numerous instrumental concertos, including those for violin and piano, as well as Antiphonie, a double concerto for clarinet, basset horn and orchestra. In 2006 he wrote his Flute Concerto (revised in 2007) which uses the reduced instrumentation of orchestras of Mozart’s era; this will be performed by the Mozarteum Orchestra. Furthermore, there are concertos for orchestra such as Color (2001), Ciaccona (2002) and Concertate il suono (2007).
Dalbavie has always been interested in the human voice. In 2008 he wrote Sonnets de Louise Labé, setting poems by the French 16th century poet; Philippe Jaroussky, the cycle’s dedicatee, will interpret the work together with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. Many facets of Marc-André Dalbavie’s oeuvre will be highlighted in Salzburg; the transparency and distinctive sound effects of his works, which can develop a tantalizing allure, along with his unmistakable personal style, have made him one of the most frequently performed contemporary composers.

Marc-Andre Dalbavie : La Source d’un regard
Marc-Andre Dalbavie : Sonnets de Louise Labé for countertenor and orchestra
Anton Bruckner : Symphony No. 1 in C minor