The renowned Ensemble Recherche play works by, among others Ase Hedstrom and Rebecca Saunders.
“The individual performances hold a high quality, of course. But what is most impressive is the interaction; it is so thoroughly prepared and tested that one forgets that this is music of an extremely high level of difficulty” wrote Aftenposten newspaper when Ensemble Recherche performed at Ultima in 1999. As well as being a composer, Frenchman Hughes Dufourt is also a philosopher, and is associated with the Spectral school. The inspiration for L’Afrique d’après Tiepolo (2010) came from a ceiling fresco in the Würzberg Residenz palace painted by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo in the 1750s. Hector Parra is a young Catalonian composer who has studied with Brian Ferneyhough and Jonathan Harvey, among others. Åse Hedstrøm headed the Ultima festival from 1994 to 1998, and was awarded the Norwegian Society of Composers’ Work of the Year Award in 1985 for this evening’s piece entitled Right After. Rebecca Saunders’ piece Murmurs from 2009 is a quiet, fragile collage composition in which Saunders makes use of the distance between the musicians in the ensemble in the room in which the piece is performed in order to create new sounds.
Hugues Dufourt: L’Afrique d’après Tiepolo
Hector Parra: Early Life
Ase Hedstrom: Right After
Rebecca Saunders: murmurs
Ensemble Recherche