Ensemble intercontemporain
Performers
Ensemble intercontemporain
Matthias Pintscher, Music Director and Conductor
Program
SCHOENBERG Five Pieces, Op. 16 (arranged for chamber ensemble by Schoenberg)
MATTHIAS PINTSCHER sonic eclipse (NY Premiere)
BOULEZ Dérive 2
Event Duration
The printed program will last approximately two hours, including one 20-minute intermission.At a Glance
This concert presents a daring work from the beginning of the atonal revolution and two compelling nontonal pieces from the avant-garde in our own time. Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra—heard here in a transcription for chamber ensemble—is explosive, compact, and dream-like, packing a world of emotion into five short sections and paving the way for the innovations of the New Viennese School. More expansive is Boulez’s Dérive 2, a hypnotic work combining recurrence with endless variety, as ideas and colors layer in intricate counterpoint over a single sonority. Boulez called the technique “narrative mosaic,” in which the music is constantly moving while seeming to stand still. Matthias Pintscher’s sonic eclipse explores the sonorities of two solo instruments, trumpet and horn, and it too involves layering. As the composer explains, the different sounds and colors of the two instruments are “gradually drawn together and made to overlap, ultimately involving the entire ensemble; the result is everything’s being melded into one voice, one instrument and one sonic gesture—which thereafter proceeds to fall back apart. In a metaphorical sense, this is precisely what happens in an eclipse.”