Beethoven 307!
I’ve always loved Beethoven.
That free spirit, so unconventional, a real pigheaded character. A misanthrope with a big heart, an irascible loner full of love and strong emotions. And his music? Well, it is him. He who is never satisfied with what is, but constantly seeks what will be, who explores new limits with every work, in rhythm, harmony, sound and instrumentation. An uncompromising quest in a world that adorned itself with a facade of post-classicism, that put Rossini on a pedestal and could barely grasp the enigma of this difficult man.
Today we are approaching the 200th anniversary of his death, and the strength, the violence, the love behind his notes (“The music behind the notes,” as Maazel always told us) drive me to honor his hunger for the future, the energy he sowed, which reaches us still clear and strong today.
New instruments. Ones he never knew. The saxophone, the great misunderstood of the 19th century, a wellspring of popular creativity in the 20th through jazz, and finally, slowly, little by little, “accepted” grudgingly, more than 100 years late, by the establishment, only in the last few decades. Electronics. Same journey: born in the computer research of the 1970s, a dazzling development outside “classical” frameworks, and only recently beginning to be integrated into some rare classical season's programmes. Two instruments that embody their era, incredibly new in their sounds and tonal possibilities, two little marvels that would have fascinated our Beethoven, and that I have no doubt he would have worked on with passion.
So I immersed myself in writing Beethoven 307. Error 307, on the web, is the temporary redirection of content to a different URL. That’s somewhat what I am doing with Beethoven. Immersed in the underlying motifs and structures of his Fifth Symphony, I am recomposing a work for saxophone quartet, electronics and strings. An ensemble impossible to imagine in 1808, yet one that brings the most classical instruments (the strings) into dialogue with the greatest inventions of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The result? Here is a short preview, recorded before the summer in our beautiful château. The rest?... It’s coming! ;-) Stay tuned!
Comments