CREATION
October 7th, 2012 - Auditorio Nacional, Madrid - Patricia Petibon and the National Orchestra of Spain, dir. Jospeh Pons.

NOTICE
I. A la mar (Moderato ipnotico) - II. Silencio mi nino (Adagio molto espressivo) - III. Hay quien dice (Largo maestoso ma energico - Allegro) - IV. Solo (Grave e malinconico - Epilogo: Moderato ipnotico, comeal  inizio).
Command Action Fund S.A.C.E.M.
A Patricia Petibon.

A la mar: 0.ca.0.2/2.1.0.0 / 2 perc / hpe / Strings
Silencio mid nino: 1.ca.1.2/0.0.0.0/hpe/Strings
Hay quien dice: pic.ca.1.2/2.1.0.0/timb-2 perc / hpe / Strings
Solo: 0.ca.1.1/0.0.0.0/hpe/Strings

Les Melodias de la melancolia, on texts by Alvaro Escobar Molina, were written in the summer of 2010 at the request of Patricia Petibon in view of being included in a discographic album dedicated to Spain and Brazil.

Like Three Love Songs, written five years earlier which Patricia Petibon travelled around the world in its version piano as with orchestra, these melodies, modestly entitled songs, appear as expressive sketches.
The first, high in hispanic color, unfolds a long complaint to the perpetual movement of the orchestra. The second is a sort of meditative lyric scene with a puccinien climate, full of tenderness, while the third one is marked by energetic revolt. The fourth and final returns to the climate of the second by means of fugal writing whose thematic elements summarize the previous melodies and lead to a brief reminder of the first, thus giving to the whole the character of a cycle designed around the idea of a gentle melancholy.

Nicolas Bacri, Tokyo, September 2011

All'ungarese Sonata (Introduzione: Adagio - Allegro veemente) - Notturno (Lentissimo ipnotico) - (attacca :) Variations and Fugue on a Minuet by Haydn: Tema (Menuetto ma non troppo presto) - Var. I (Misterioso) - Var. II (Inquieto) - Var. III (Con spirito, alla passacaglia) - Var. IV (Subito drammatico, poco meno mosso) - Var. V (Andantino grazioso e sereno, quasi una serenata) - Var. VI (Allegro alla fuga) - Var. VII (Epilogo: The istesso tempo - Quasi metà movimento, Adagio - Presto con bravura). A Georges Zeisel

"I have been much concerned throughout my composing life with two of these forms, the symphony and the string quartet. The first is a public form, the second private, but they share the same Classical archetype, Which is so well-known that almost everyone who listens to music will have some notion of what a symphony or string quartet should be. According to Hans Keller's useful theory, the richest kind of musical experience is provided by "the meaningful contradiction of expectation." This assumes that the listener will have some idea of what to expect, so that he will be pleasurably surprised by the contradictions that an inventive composer will provide . If on the other hand to attempt to be wholly new, then no real surprises are possible. To write a movement in sonata form is somewhat daunting, as you are competing with - and almost inevitably failing to equal - the many supreme examples of such movements from the past. But it gives you access to a world where meaningful contradiction has-been practised for two-and-a-half centuries, and although many of the devices of confounding expectation have been over-exploited and have themselves become clichés, it is not impossible to renew them by inner conviction; and there are still new games to play."

David Matthews Reviving the Muse: Essays on Music After Modernism, edited by Peter Davison, Claridge Press, 2001

By this quote from a short text (which I could have written word for word, but here I simply translated) from one of my most esteemed British colleagues, David Matthews, author born in 1943 and to date, six of eleven symphonies and string quartets, I would like to begin this introduction to my String Quartet No. 8, subtitled "Homage to Haydn" in this year where we celebrate, and rightly so, the great Viennese composer. Viennese Classicism has always intrigued me, even in the days when I grew to distrust him, which for my young age, seemed perfectly legitimate. Classicism as I perceived at the time was synonymous with order and balance on the one hand, courtesy of face and other affectations, all values exceeded the frenzied revolutionary as I thought then, and which could logically lead to a deep boredom ...
After a period marked by the post-serialism, where I avoided to use classical forms of music while trying to soak up the rigor of their principles for the formal experiments of another kind, I was led to reconsider them gradually from the inside (from my Symphony No. 2, op. 22, 1986 to 1990) to revisit the first frontally "the" archetypal form of classicism, the famous "sonata form" in a work ostensibly neo-classical, my Symphony No. 4 (Classical Symphony "Sturm und Drang", op. 49, 1996) and from there, trying to define what could be a timeless classic (which speaks without naming David Matthews in the quote highlighted). This timeless classic is not the neo-classicism that some minds would like it to be simplistic but "something more complicated" to quote our friend Georges Zeisel which this work is dedicated, to when he told me his impressions after the hearing of my seventh quartet (Serious Variations op. 101).
To summarize schematically (and recalling that I deepened the question in my book, Notes Etrangère) I will just point out that the concepts of neo-classicism and a temporel classicism,are from my point of view, not only different but opposite, since the first characterizes classicism to show the impossibility of true restoration, while the latter is engaged in settling a job that highlights the most lively aspects and therefore actual, the process of writing found in music since the classical period.
Faced with the challenge of this command for a quartet as a tribute to Haydn I had two options: write a new neo-classical work, in the vein of my Symphony No. 4 or my recent Diletto classico, piano, or opt for the timeless classic that characterizes most of my music for over twenty years now ... For me, the neo-classicism as I understand it only offers a limited value in itself (not to mention its over-exploitation in the twenties and thirties which makes it "historical") and Ionly use it when I feel the need for total immersion in the tradition that is to say, rarely ... This immersion not to be fatal (I mean by "immersion fatal" one that would result in the complete disappearance of ones own musical personality) must be used, it seems to me, with the greatest precaution in this case under the greatest paradox possible, as this is to immerse oneself at the same time taking the maximum distance from the object in which to immerse oneself! And this distance is the stylistic shift that is obtained, which is not without consequences ... So the source of mischief and even irony that characterizes the aesthetic neo-classical ... But the mischief of Haydn is something essential! The line was stretched to me and tightend ! Well I took it in my own way! I decided that I will pay tribute to Haydn's humor and also, and above all, his sense of surprise, but ... as seriously as possible (!) and not referring to neo-classicism and only occasionally as a "quote style" although absolutely integrated into all ... "Complicated", indeed!

The work, which began Sept. 9, 2008, and ended 1 March 2009, opens with a sonata-form movement titled all'ungarese Sonata (Sonata in Hungarian blink -Eye to the period of Haydn Estherazy) preceded by an introduction based on the rather dark intervals obtained by the sequence of notes corresponding to the English notation letters H, A and D (Haydn). The allegro follows with a classic and dancing theme at the same time quite dramatic. The second theme, more expressive, occurs only after a measure of silence. This measure of silence, a tribute to the genius of Haydn's surprise (and anticipation of the extent of silence that will appear in the minuet of the Austrian composer who will be subject to variations in the third movement of my quartet), will return to close the exposition and close the development. It plays the role of a tag as much as it dramatizes the formal in a fun way. The recapitulation the first theme returns and typically forks after twenty measures of new development. The measure of silence returns one last time just before the recapitulation of the second theme, transposed as it should, in the "tone" of the first theme and the movement ends briefly with a recall some what mischievous the main reason for the first theme.
The second movement, entitled Notturno, is a kind of simple Aria which surprises us with its unexpected modulations, but whose main function is to allow maximum relaxation after the dramatic intensity of the first movement and before the final shape variation that follows. The theme of Haydn, the minuet in D minor, the last string quartet (unfinished), published as op. 103, the musician Estheraza, feeling his creative forces leaving him, wrote shortly before permanently ceasing to compose in 1803, some six years before his death. Note that if this is not the first time I've written variations on a theme of a famous composer it is the first time I dared to present at the beginning of the work. " br /> In other compositions of this kind I always hear the theme at the end. Here I took the enormous risk, of passing after the master and continuing with five variations (to play the Scherzo in the whole of the quartet), which are all taken with little minuet with variations on this theme in a light one after the other turns mysterious (Var. I), worried (Var. II), humorous, shaped Passacaglia (Var. III, con spirito, alla passacaglia), dramatic and passionate (Var. IV), gallant (Var. V Andantino grazioso e Sognando, quasi una serenata) before arriving at a sixth form of runaway change (making its final act), the subject of seven measures, starting from C minor (rather than C minor), is itself an motivated resumé not only the theme of Haydn but of the whole quartet giving to this flight the function of a great treminaldevelopment .

If this flight follows quite well the pattern of the school flight with its tonal logic assumed, it gives us the surprise of a stretto-cons on the subject before a paraphrase of the theme of Haydn in C minor and giving rise to a new thematic work, and slow cantabile, before a Presto con bravura, the last several issues, leads to a unison of the four instruments on the head of the theme and the brilliant conclusion of the quartet on the main motive of the first movement sweeps everything before it to conclude triumphantly in D Major.

Nicolas Bacri, Brussels, March 2009