Ensemble Contrechamps

Together with outstanding soloists, the Contrechamps Ensemble will perform the German premières of the new Concerto for piano and ensemble by Beat Furrer and the ensemble piece La conspiration du silence by the French composer Franck Bedrossian. They will also present two ensemble pieces by György Kurtág as well as Contra-relief, a piece by the young Russian composer Dmitri Kourliandsky. Kourliandsky is currently the guest of the Artists-in-Berlin Programme of the DAAD. MaerzMusik 2009 will present a portrait of Kourliandsky and the Structural ResistanceGroup (StRes), a network of young Russian composers.

Kurtág’s …quasi una fantasia… is a “Raummusik” full of concentrated, sparse gestures, excitement, despair and drama, soft explosions and fragile envelopes of sound. This fragility also informs What is the Word, a setting for voices and ensemble of the last text written by Samuel Beckett, a kaleidoscope of twenty-four words that reappear in ever-changing combinations. Originally composed for a female vocalist with a speech impediment, the composition revolves around the motif of the laborious quest for language, sounds, words and articulations.

Kourliandsky’s Contra-relief is an attempt to reconstruct Vladimir Tatlin’s monument for the Third Communist International. The piece forms part of the programme “Reconstruction” of the Structural Resistance Group (StRes). This programme is devoted to the reconstruction of lost monuments and utopian projects of the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s.

Beat Furrer’s Concerto for piano and ensemble is the continuation and the epitome of his studies of the sound of the piano, in which he examines its phenomena, resonances, overtone spectra and pedal effects in order to underscore the plasticity of its sound. The ensemble functions as a kind of amplifier that provides a resonant space for the piano.