Marek Konstantynowicz / Cikada Ensemble / Norwegian Radio Orchestra / Christian Eggen MORTON FELDMAN The Viola in My Life

THE VIOLA IN MY LIFE

 

Igor Levit ENCOUNTER

ENCOUNTER

Darragh Morgan / John Tilbury MORTON FELDMAN For John Cage

FOR JOHN CAGE

Aisha Orazbayeva, Mark Knoop MORTON FELDMAN For John Cage

Morton Feldman and John Cage met at a New York performance of Webern’s aphoristic Symphony in 1950, the pair’s friendship enduring until Feldman's death in 1987. Some of Feldman's late chamber works are inordinately long. For John Cage, written in 1979, lasts 75 minutes in this performance. Trying to describe exactly why and how this music ‘works’ is near-impossible. Describing it as a formally diffuse extended duet between violin and piano, the pair often on the edge of audibility, will send some folk running for the hills. Repeated hearings bring the work’s three-part structure into sharper focus, the transformations and allusions seemingly more recognisable each time.

What's magical about so much of Feldman's music is how he can make the most uncompromising dissonance sound warm and consoling. This slow-paced piece doesn't contain hummable tunes, but it's intensely beautiful at times, Mark Knoop’s, soft, bell-like piano chords sharing the space with Aisha Orazbeyava’s violin. Near the close, the violin’s double stopping almost suggests the presence of a third player. “I tried to bring into my music just very few essential things that I need,” said Feldman, and after having overdosed on Rued Langgaard (see below), this disc proved to be a perfect musical decluttering. Nicely engineered, it’s one of several new releases on the label All That Dust, each one neatly presented and well annotated.

Manuel Zurria REPEAT!

The restless experimentation and creativity of Manuel Zurria (of Alter Ego fame) has resulted in a brilliant series of collaborative works with legendary composers such as Luc Ferrari, Alvin Lucier, Arvo Pärt, John Cage, Morton Feldman, László Sáry, Louis Andriessen, Aldo Clementi, Zoltan Jeney, Stefano Scodanibbio, Salvatore Sciarrino, Jonathan Harvey and Kevin Volans. A truly stunning mixture of electronic and longform electro-acoustic pieces, repetitive ethnic rhythms, drones and delay, field recordings, flute and the human voice.

Repeat is the diary of an obsession that has been accompanying me for four long years. Alighiero Boetti, one of the fathers of Italian conceptual art, had fit out along a wall of his house in Rome his most introspective work: The Wall. On this wall he showed, continuously modifying their choice and position, objects and works belonging to his own production or to the one of other artists friends, together with objects he found by chance on the street, family pictures and drawings of his children. In other words, his own world. During the realisation of this project I have been reading “Difference and Repetition” by Gilles Deleuze, which gave me the occasion to ponder on the involvements that bring back to the principle of repetition in music of our time. In a certain sense, Deleuze’s writing allowed me to focus on the importance of repetition as a perceptive fact, and as an experience of listening in accumulation. In the same time, I thought of repetition as difference, as a minimal fact, as trance. This element has been determinant in my activity and allowed me to collaborate during the years with musicians who look at repetition as an exciting experience, both physical and mystic. (Manuel Zurria)

John Tilbury / Philip Thomas MORTON FELDMAN Two Pianos and other pieces, 1953-1969

The music featured on these two discs testifies to the intensity of Feldman’s experimentation with notation and sound during the 1950s and 60s. Considering the works chronologically one senses the composer trying out, teasing and developing means of notation to get close to his desired elasticity of time and duration. His experiments with indeterminacy of pitch – whereby Feldman specified only the register (high, middle, low) of sound rather than the exact notes themselves – do not feature here; after trying this method in a series of works in the early 1950s he abandoned the technique, with a few notable exceptions straying into the 1960s, because he was too ‘attached’ to the pitches he wanted. 

All notes are specified exactly in the pieces on these discs – the experiments are instead with duration and time. Durations of sounds are variously free, dependent upon the decay of the sound, worked out in coordination with other players, as well as at times exactly and complexly notated within a specific tempo. Sometimes the freedoms of notating time are worked through in combination with listening closely to the sounds of other players, allowing patterns to emerge without forcing the situation, whilst at other times different ways of notating time are combined, creating false alignments in the score and thus placing greater emphasis upon the individual performer’s journey.

The piano is an inherently indeterminate instrument - any given note will have a very different afterlife dependent upon the touch of the performer, the register of the note, the type and size of the piano, the acoustic of the space in which the piano is situated, and so forth. Put six or seven of these notes together as a chord and the situation becomes complex. In all these pieces Feldman specifies the dynamics to be quiet, or as quiet as possible, or very quiet. However the notion that Feldman’s music is ‘about’ quiet-ness is a misconception: the subject is sound, and in order for that subject to be properly attended to those sounds are quiet. The range of pieces presented here depict very many different types of quietness – from the delicate sounds of Piano Three Hands and Piano Four Hands to the massed complexities of Two Pieces for Three Pianos. Quietness in Feldman’s piano music is a performance instruction which is everything to do with touch and the desire to really hear the instrument. As such these recordings are a celebration of the piano (its tone and its decay) and piano playing, for all its frustrations and challenges – an instrument which is at the heart of Feldman’s music. (Philip Thomas)

MORTON FELDMAN Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello

"Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello" (often abbreviated to "PVVC") was Morton Feldman's final composition, receiving its premiere on July 4th 1987, less than two months before the composer's death from pancreatic cancer on September 3rd. This recording of the piece dates from January 2017 at Henry Wood Hall, where it was recorded by Simon Reynell. The quartet of Mark Knoop on piano, Aisha Orazbayeva on violin, Bridget Carey on viola and Anton Lukoszevieze on cello had performed "PVVC" the previous September at Café Oto, on a night that stuck in the minds of musicians and audience, alike, for being one of the year's hottest. 

Having come through that night successfully, the January recording afforded the quartet a valuable opportunity to apply what they had learnt from the Oto performance and the audience's reaction to it. As Knoop has commented, "I always like returning to things after a first performance as there are some aspects of the music which can only reveal themselves in performance, no matter how much rehearsal is done."

The recording runs for seventy-four minutes, making it a challenge to maintain concentration both for the performers and the listener. The composition is as uncomplicated as its title suggests. Lacking any formal structure or obvious peaks and troughs, it evolves at its own glacial pace, with the introduction of even the smallest motif acquiring significance. While it is in progress, its twin fascinations lie in the smooth, effortless ease with which Feldman achieved that evolution without disquieting the listener, and the skill with which the quartet perform the music without occasioning comment.

Throughout, piano and strings operate together as an integrated unit, seeming to think, move, inhale and exhale as one. Altogether, it makes a beguiling listening experience but, because of that, concentration can easily be lost. With time and effort, it is possible to maintain focus throughout, whereupon the true beauty of the piece reveals itself, more and more with each new listening. An important and valuable addition to both the Another Timbre catalogue and the Feldman discography.“ (John Eyles / All About Jazz)

Marek Konstantynowicz / Cikada Ensemble / Norwegian Radio Orchestra / Christian Eggen MORTON FELDMAN The Viola in My Life

Morton Feldman’s The Viola in My Life (1970/71) is a work of great scope and detail. Each of its first three parts is scored for viola and a variety of chamber ensembles, while the last pairs viola with orchestra in what Feldman calls a “translation” of the first three. Unlike his earlier forays into indeterminacy, Viola is thoroughly composed. Its genius lies in Feldman’s ability to forge massive amounts of empty space into a layered resonance that is anything but “minimal.” The music slowly undulates in tune with the viola’s crests and fades, touched by patches of darkness like a figure slowly walking through lattice-obstructed sunlight. The viola is the center around which the other instruments revolve. This revolution brings the listener full circle with each new phrase, for despite the seeming regularity, each marks an uncertain orbit. The piano in parts I and III grazes the edges of silence, in pursuit of nothing but its own pursuit; the celesta in part II dots our minds with stars; and the orchestral backdrop of part IV carries the viola like a feather riding an upward breath. Such ethereality harbors no romantic promise of freedom. As Feldman himself admits, “The viola’s crescendos are a return to a preoccupation with a musical perspective which is not determined by an interaction of corresponding musical ideas—but rather like a bird trying to soar in a confined landscape.” Eventually we must reperch, and Viola is constantly skirting the boundaries of our cage like a silent but ever-watchful eye. And as I drift off to sleep during the final movement, I feel the eye closing around me, like a lost child embracing himself in lieu of human contact.

This album could easily be titled “The Life in My Viola,” for it is so rich with intimations of a generative spirit. The recording and performances are finely attuned to the music’s inner core, the Cikada Ensemble creating a fine setting for Marek Konstantynowicz’s restrained soloing throughout. Morton Feldman can be a challenge, but his rewards can be even more internal than his music. (ECM Reviews)

Murcof / Vanessa Wagner STATEA

Statea is essentially about augmentation: Murcof's electronics enhancing Vanessa Wagner's piano. But the idea goes further. Statea is the result of an impromptu live performance that took place in 2010 at La Carrière De Normandoux, an old quarry in France that was turned into a contemporary arts centre. One artist's concert was taking place after the other's, so Wagner bridged the gap by playing pieces by Erik Satie. Murcof joined her, and their improvisation has since grown.
Statea revolves around minimalist piano compositions, including Aphex Twin's lyrical "Avril 14th." On the surface, that may seem like a wildcard inclusion, nestled next to Arvo Pärt and György Ligeti, but it's part of a wider narrative: augmenting the minimal music tradition itself. Some selections even pre-date minimalism's 1960s New York origins, ascribed to forefathers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Only Glass appears here, his Kafka-inspired "Metamorphosis 2" concluding Statea with one of the record's purest recordings.  

Statea is less of a music history lesson than a dialogue between its collaborators. When they perform together, Murcof and Wagner take turns leading the charge, and it's the same here. Their version of John Cage's "In A Landscape" starts out with naturalistic playing from Wagner, before Murcof begins smearing the keys like watercolours. His electro-acoustic touches are subtle at first, but become intense enough that Wagner is all but phased out by the end. "In A Landscape" is morphed into something else entirely. "Musica Ricercata No. 2" is more of a melodramatic call and response between the two players. Wagner's playing is dynamic and emotive, but Murcof's rebuttals are more stinging. It goes to show the gulf between traditional musicians, limited to an instrument's physicality, and those with technology's endless possibilities.
For all of its alluring electronics, Statea would be nothing without the clarity of Wagner's piano. It's such contrasts—classical and ambient, the past and the present, the accentuated and the ambiguous—that make the record more than the sum of its parts, sounding richer and more nuanced with every listen. As a snapshot of a performance-based collaboration, Statea is strong, but the project's full scope can only be experienced in the concert halls that birthed it. (Holly Dicker)

Steven Osborne FELDMAN - CRUMB

I can’t imagine Morton Feldman, cantankerous curmudgeon that he was, would have been thrilled at the prospect of having his music paired with that of George Crumb, but Steven Osborne makes a solid case beyond any obvious fact that their careers happened to overlap during a certain period in the history of American music.

The arid, slapped clusters of Feldman’s Extensions 3 (1952) set the tone nicely for Crumb’s painterly, Giotto-inspired A Little Suite for Christmas, AD 1979 (1980), which itself begins with an accumulation of compacted clusters. But wisely Osborne doesn’t try to push any supposed stylistic affiliation too far. Intermission 5, Piano Piece 1952 and Extensions 3 are exemplars of Feldman’s formative experiments with reconfiguring musical scale, and were all written in 1952. The seamless procession of harmonically tangled dotted crotchets, alternating between right and left hands, arranged neatly to form Piano Piece 1952 is marked ‘Slowly and quietly with all beats equal’ and Osborne does Feldman’s bidding cleanly and accurately; clearly he’s thought long and hard about the implications Feldman’s indication has for shaking entrenched patterns of expressive behaviour.

If the challenge Piano Piece 1952 presents is keeping Feldman’s gyrating contours contained within a narrow bandwidth of dynamic and pulse, Intermission 5 and Extensions 3 are both concerned with blunt contrasts of dynamic and texture. On Mode, Aki Takahashi pushes Extensions 3 to a death-defying 6'43"; at 5'30" Osborne keeps a safety net, but this is a very fine performance. Abrupt juxtapositions of slammed fff chords breaking into echoing ppp aftershocks make the piano resonate like you never heard, and Hyperion’s microphones intimately capture the wailing overtones and ricocheting piano action.

Palais de Mari (1986) is Feldman’s most-recorded piano work, and Osborne’s supple control of overaching line and timbre means this is a real contender alongside hardcore Feldmanistas such as Aki Takahashi, John Tilbury (LondonHALL) and Steffen Schleiermacher (MDG). The sort of dramatic rhetoric Crumb throws around finds Osborne patrolling more familiar terrain, and A Little Suite for Christmas in particular receives a dramatically vigilant and eloquently coloured reading. Feldman and Crumb pair rather well together—but, shush, don’t tell Morty. (Gramophone)

Ensemble Intercontemporain / Matthias Pintscher NEW YORK

The Ensemble intercontemporain is a contemporary music ensemble  of 31 soloists dedicated to the performance and promotion of music from the 20th and 21st centuries.
For over 30 years, this permanent ensemble of highly professional musicians has been performing a demanding repertoire of orchestral music in all its diverse forms. Under the artistic direction of Matthias Pintscher  they are united by a shared passion for new music. They accompany composers in the exploration of new musical realms, nourished by inventions (new performance and extended techniques, computer music, etc.) and encounters with other forms of artistic expression such as dance, theatre, video and visual arts. 
In residence at the Philharmonie de Paris, The Ensemble intercontemporain performs in France and abroad as a regular guest at major international festivals. The Ensemble also organizes a range of outreach activities ( educational concerts, school music workshops, master classes, etc.) serving a diversified public (conservatory students, professional and amateur musicians, general audience, etc.)

Kim Kashkashian / Sarah Rothenberg / Steven Schick MORTON FELDMAN - ERIK SATIE - JOHN CAGE Rothko Chapel

The album ‘Rothko Chapel’ addresses a network of musical relationships and inspirations, taking as its main focus Morton Feldman’s work named for the Houston, Texas multi-faith chapel built to house Mark Rothko’s site-specific paintings.

Feldman considered that his ‘Rothko Chapel’ lay “between categories, between time and space, between painting and music”, and described the score as his “canvas”. Amongst his most important influences were abstract painters, his friend Mark Rothko prominent amongst them. (Rothko, for his part, yearned to “raise painting to the level of music and poetry”.) Feldman was also liberated by the freewheeling example of John Cage’s work. “The main influence from Cage was a green light,'' Feldman said. ''It was permission, the freedom to do what I wanted.'' Cage, the most relentless of 20th century experimentalists, didn’t acknowledge what he called an “ABC model of ‘influence’” but always had a special fondness for Satie, a musical inventor of good-humoured originality with whom he could identify.

Feldman’s piece was first played in the chapel in 1972. On the 40th anniversary of the opening of the Rothko Chapel in 2011, a concert was held there bringing together works of Feldman, Cage and Satie. This programme was reprised for the present CD with recordings made at other Houston locations - Rice University (Cage, Satie) and the Brown Foundation Performing Arts Theater (Feldman).

Leading viola player Kim Kashkashian negotiates the subtle, glowing textures of Feldman’s planes of sound, joined by Sarah Rothenberg on celeste, and supported by percussion and choir. Rothenberg, on piano, plays Satie’s Gnossiennes and Cage’s Inner Landscape, and the Houston Chamber Choir sings Cage’s Four, Five and more, illuminating this rarely heard choral music. (Presto Classical)

Aisha Orazbayeva THE HAND GALLERY

As time passes, achieving true originality and distinction in the field of music becomes an increasingly difficult task as musical boundaries become eroded, genres overlap and merge and techniques grow ever more experimental. Finding space to genuinely stand out is something that evades many artists.

Yet, it is something that Kazakh violinist Aisha Orazbayeva has shown is still possible. Her name may not be particularly well known outside the circles of contemporary classical music but her career to date has seen her accumulate a range of impressive achievements. She’s performed at some of the world’s most acclaimed classical and experimental venues (Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, Cafe OTO), worked with some of the most respected composers of modern, leftfield classical music (Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Helmut Lachenmann and Pierre Boulez) and is also a co-director of the London Contemporary Music Festival (which this year focuses on the works of pioneering electroacoustic composer Bernard Parmegiani).

She has a refreshingly relaxed approach to and view of music, having spoken of her distrust of musical categorisation and stylistic segregation, something noticeable on The Hand Gallery. Her debut album Outside set the bar high, incorporating traditional classical repertoire such as Ravel’s Violin Sonata in G Minor, alongside more defiantly avant-garde material such as Salvatore Sciarrino‘s Six Caprices and a collaboration with electronic musician Peter Zinovieff. Her second album The Hand Gallery is released on PRAH Recordings, the experimental offshoot set up by Moshi Moshi’s Stephen Bass, and sees her maintain an uncompromising and radical direction.

Much of the music on The Hand Gallery will undoubtedly be a challenge to the unaccustomed, causal listener. Her version of Violin Phase by Steve Reich has a discipline and rigidity while she plays For Aaron Copland by Morton Feldman with a lamenting faithfulness. A second piece dedicated to Aaron Copland follows later, the hushed, minimal caresses of the strings here evoking distant winds.

It is possibly the two tracks that feature her vocals that surprise the most. Her interpretation of Harbour Lights by Elvis Presley reveals her voice to be soft and gentle alongside the comparative austerity of much of the sound derived from her instrument. Here, the plucked violin conveys sounds from a different era in a similar way to that of someone like Josephine Foster. Later, her cover of John Cale’s Baby You Know has a sharp sensuousness to it and the album is closed by a version of the same track arranged for solo violin, arguably the most accessible and successful moment on The Hand Gallery.

Two Sounds Two and Aloise meanwhile offer the two of the more defiantly avant-garde moments of the album, the former unearthing strange, unsettling timbres and emissions from deep inside the body of the instrument while the latter striking a far more inflammatory, destructive tone, recalling last year’s similarly visceral Ghil 3 by Korean cellist Okkyung Lee.

The Hand Gallery shows Orazbayeva to be a musician deeply immersed in her instrument, striving for newness and musical freedom. For those who like their music to operate at the outer limits and be served with moments of enjoyable difficulty, it will be viewed as a fearless and innovative piece of work.

Michael Tilson Thomas / New World Symphony Orchestra MORTON FELDMAN Coptic Light

It's difficult to explain why Morton Feldman's music is so hot these days. Quiet, uneventful, dissonant, and often extremely lengthy, his works don't seem all that accessible on paper. But hearing is believing, as they say, and unlike some avant-garde music, appreciation of Feldman's art requires no understanding of arcane forms or compositional techniques. Perhaps this is because Feldman was influenced more by the abstract paintings of Philip Guston and Mark Rothko than by the music of any of his contemporaries. Listen to "Coptic Light" 1986 -- one of the composer's final works and his orchestral masterpiece -- a hypnotic kaleidoscope of slowly shifting colors, with no melody and no discernible rhythmic patterns, just wave after wave of gorgeously gauzy sound. This music is so colorful and finely textured that you can almost see and feel it. In fact, experiencing it fully requires your visual and tactile senses as much as your hearing. Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas draws expressively serene performances from the Miami-based New World Symphony. Pianist Alan Feinberg finds infinite shades of pianissimo in the simply-titled "Piano and Orchestra," and cellist Robert Cohen imbues the spare yet profound lines of "Cello and Orchestra" with intensely quiet yearning. This extraordinary recording should be snatched up by Feldman's growing legion of fans and win many new converts, as well. (Andrew Farach-Colton)

Overlapping textures and soft, shifting timbres are the most recognizable features of Morton Feldman's music, and his attractive sonorities draw listeners in ways other avant-garde sound structures may not. This music's appeal is also attributable to its gentle ambience, a static, meditative style that Feldman pioneered long before trance music became commonplace. The three works on this disc are among Feldman's richest creations, yet the material in each piece is subtly layered and integrated so well that many details will escape detection on first hearing. In "Piano and Orchestra," the piano is treated as one texture among many, receding to the background and blending with muted brass and woodwinds in a wash of colors. "Cello and Orchestra" might seem like a conventional concerto movement, especially since the cellist is centrally placed on this recording and plays with a rather lyrical tone. However, Feldman's orchestral clusters are dense and interlocked, which suggests that the cello should be less prominent and blend more into the mass of sounds behind it. No such ambiguity exists in the performance of "Coptic Light," which Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony Orchestra play with even dynamics and careful attention to the work's aggregate effect, which is mesmerizing. (Blair Sanderson)

David Greilsammer BAROQUE CONVERSATIONS

This Sony-label debut release by Israeli pianist David Greilsammer has much in common with his earlier recording Fantasie Fantasme, released on the Naxos label. In fact, here Greilsammer might be said to have refined the ideas on the earlier album. Both combine contemporary and mainstream repertory, and apparently Greilsammer has an inclination toward pretentious graphic design. But here the focus is tightened. Greilsammer constructs a sequence of four Baroque three-movement "pieces," each consisting of three compositions. Of these sets of three, the outer two are Baroque works, while the center is a contemporary piece, commissioned in two cases by Greilsammer himself from contemporary Israeli composers. Greilsammer balances these works cleverly: the structure of the sets of three is not fast-slow-fast, but not simply random, either; the pieces instead are linked by motive and mood, with the modern work emerging as just a slight shift from what precedes it, and as a logical introduction to the finale. One might make several objections along the way: the Handel Suite for keyboard in D minor, HWV 447, with its four movements, disturbs the plan for no very good reason, and Greilsammer's readings of the Baroque pieces, especially the opening Gavotte et Six Doubles of Rameau, are a bit too dreamy, a bit too obviously bent to the requirements of the project. Still, there's no denying that Greilsammer has come closer than most other performers to the grail of integrating contemporary music into a mainstream concert program, and that he has done it in a very inventive way. The combination of a Frescobaldi toccata and the Wiegenmusik of German-born composer Helmut Lachenmann, each with little figures gracefully spinning off an underlying rhythm, is especially effective. Recommended for listeners of a speculative frame of mind. (James Manheim)

Carolin Widmann / Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra MORTON FELDMAN Violin and Orchestra

Carolin Widmann’s widely acclaimed ECM New Series recordings have traversed a broad arc of music – from Schubert to Xenakis. Her award-winning album of contemporary music “Phantasy of Spring”, released in 2009, opened with Morton’s Feldman’s “Spring of Chosroes”; now she returns to Feldman with one of the US composer’s pivotal compositions, Violin and Orchestra, written in 1979. With its almost painterly attention to detail and to texture, this slowly unfolding single-movement work marked a new direction in Feldman’s music. It is not a concerto in the strict sense of the term, not soloist with orchestral support. The violinist must move inside the glowing colour-field of sound. In this exceptional Feldman recording, Widmann does so with great delicacy and feeling, exploring the subtle orchestral texture, crafted together with conductor Emilio Pomàrico and the players of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra.
“In the noisiest century in history,” critic Alex Ross has noted, “Morton Feldman chose to be glacially slow and snowily soft. [In his music] chords arrive one after another, in seemingly haphazard sequence, interspersed with silences. Harmonies hover in a no man’s land between consonance and dissonance, paradise and oblivion.” Violin and Orchestra calls for the largest instrumentation Feldman specified – including quadruple and triple winds and brass, four percussionists, two harps, two pianos and a corresponding body of strings. Yet the work is quiet, dreamlike.
“Feldman is a great favourite of mine,” says Carolin Widmann. “His music has in my opinion not only contemporary but everlasting relevance for its unique language and the ways in which it seems to suspend time, to freeze it. Sometimes when I listen to Feldman I’m unsure if a few minutes or half an eternity has passed. As one enters into its spatial dimension you stop thinking about where this music has come from and where it is headed and you become part of it. And that opens up philosophical questions. How does this music change us, as listeners?”
“As a player, you have to immerse yourself in the Feldman cosmos. In Violin and Orchestra, the violin is first among equals. What Feldman brings out of the instrument in terms of sound and colour is very beautiful. But it’s by no means a piece for demonstrating instrumental capacity. This concept is completely abolished (in my view it could usefully be challenged in much classical and Romantic repertoire, too). To play Feldman, you have to take a back seat and make sure that all expression is solely in the service of the music. That’s also a kind of spiritual exercise, and one that obliges the violinist to question the parameters of personal style, peeling away all superfluous gesture.”
Violin and Orchestra was premiered by Paul Zukofsky and the Hessian Radio Orchestra with Cristóbal Halfter conducting, in Frankfurt in 1984. The present recording, with Carolin Widmann and the Frankfurter Radio Orchestra, was aided by the support of the Festival d’Automne à Paris, who also presented the work in the autumn of 2009.