Homage to Italian composers
The 13th season of the Aventa Ensemble, the local chamber orchestra devoted to contemporary music, will commence on Sunday with a program curated and conducted by the composer Giorgio Magnanensi.
Born in Bologna in 1960, Magnanensi has been artistic director of Vancouver New Music since 2000. He lives in Roberts Creek, on the Sunshine Coast, and founded the arts society Laboratorio there in 2007.
Sunday’s concert will be the first time a complete Aventa program has been conducted by someone other than Bill Linwood, the ensemble’s co-founder and artistic director, though Linwood says he hopes to schedule guest conductors more often in the future, especially where conductor and repertoire are intimately connected.
That is certainly the case with Magnanensi’s program, which pays homage to three Italian composers who have long inspired and influenced him: Franco Donatoni (1927-2000), who was his teacher in Italy in the late 1980s; Salvatore Sciarrino (born 1947), with whom he once worked in the early 1990s; and Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988).
The program begins with three short works for mixed ensembles of five to nine instru- ments: Scelsi’s Pranam II (1973), Sciarrino’s Lo spazio inverso (1985), and Donatoni’s Arpège (1986). As a finale, Magnanensi will direct TDU XX, a 20-minute piece for 10 instruments that he wrote especially for this concert. TDU stands for “teatro dell’ udito” (“theatre of hearing”), and he has recently written several works under this heading, exploring “techniques of collage and assemblage of heterogeneous forms with a programmatic character.”
In Sunday’s hour-long program, titled Tracce e Palinsesti (“traces and palimpsests”), there will be no intermission and no silences between pieces. To achieve a continuous, immersive “flow of music,” Magnanensi has created five-minute sound “panels” that will link the first three works and ultimately coalesce in TDU XX. (He compares the program’s overall form to a mobile by Calder.) All of his contributions require significant use of live electronics, some of which he will run himself on stage.
Incidentally, the Aventa Ensemble has been performing Magnanensi’s music for a decade now, locally and on tour, and has commissioned three works from him. It has performed a handful of his other works, too, over the years, most recently last November, and he contributed both a new commissioned piece and “live visuals” to a special concert Aventa gave at the Vancouver Aquatic Centre in 2012. The next concert from the Early Music Society of the Islands, on Saturday, is devoted to repertoire that might seem dry: vocal polyphony from the 10th and 11th centuries, mostly drawn from the Winchester Troper, an important early manuscript source from that English city. The program even includes a credit for “musicological consultant.”
But the music will be performed by Dialogos, an internationally acclaimed vocal ensemble from Paris that (to judge from its recordings) has a real gift for enlivening medieval music in innovative ways. One of its specialties is liturgical theatre, and on Saturday it will take about two dozen short pieces and present them as a sort of play, semi-staged and with English surtitles, running about 65 minutes with no intermission.
Katarina Livljanic, the Croatian-born singer and scholar who founded Dialogos in 1997 and still directs it, summarizes the program thus: “We follow the path of a penitent man haunted by his visionary dreams, trying to escape from three raging Furies, wild as wolves, and finally finding salvation from Swithun, saint of all miracles.”
A cult of Swithun — the transformation of the saint into what Livljanic calls “a sort of AngloSaxon medieval Superman”— began at Winchester in 971, when his relics were transferred to Old Minster, the local cathedral.
Saturday’s program includes 10 pieces representing half a dozen species of medieval church music (invitatory, antiphon, Introit, responsory, hymn, sequence). In addition, to “create a continuous story” and “put the story in its context,” Livljanic has interspersed selections, which she herself set to music, from two biographies of Swithun written about 1000 by clerics associated with Old Minster.
Dialogos draws on women’s or men’s voices depending on the repertoire at hand. On Saturday, it will comprise four women, Livljanic among them.