This is (no) Mozart is back!

In recent weeks, I have taken up my "concerto for synth and orchestra" This is (no) Mozart, created 5 years ago with my friends from the Lecce Philharmonic Orchestra, during the first edition of the JeansMusic Festival. The occasion is the new production we will set up here in Aigle next April for the Amis de la Musique for this Swiss premiere of the work.

The main idea behind this work was the one that has motivated my creativity since BachBox: to create electronic music "around" masterpieces of the repertoire that I love, and that I have performed for the last twenty years. I wanted to change the context of performance of secular works, without changing their form or content, and to immerse them in an entirely contemporary context to bring out their eternal, transcendent content.

The work This is (no) Mozart places Mozart's Symphony in G minor, his fortieth and perhaps his most famous, at the center of the stage. It surrounds it with five movements for electronics and unamplified classical orchestra that develop its motifs and themes.

And we realize, upon discovering this symphony in the middle of an electronic work, that it feels perfectly at home in its new outfit, and has not aged a day. This is quite incredible if we consider that it was composed in 1788... 236 years ago! And yet, Mozart's incredible ability to work with motifs, an ancient art inherited from the fugue and which would become the trademark of Beethoven (think of his fifth symphony) is nevertheless not far from the modern concept of minimalism (even if very far in the realization, I agree). And so one step away from electronics, and its programmed sequences!

But I had a second idea in mind while working on this work. Mixing my synthesizers with the classical orchestra, but without amplifying the acoustic instruments, so as to preserve all the harmonic richness while mixing it with the electric sound, which manages its volume accordingly.

The orchestra therefore plays with the synths and the live electronics as if they were an organ placed in the middle of the group... that's why I called it a "concerto for electronics and orchestra". This concept, that I applied the first times in 2021, worked well, to the point of being able to develop it as well with the piano in Sounds of elements or Nocturnes électroniques, as, to a certain extent, with the cello in BreakBachDance.