Biography

PREMIERE

15/11/2012? : Paris, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées?. Choeur de Radio France, Orchestre National de France, Daniele Gatti (conduc.)

NOTE

This is the second time that I have been asked to pay musical homage to Beethoven: following Riccardo Chailly's request, I incorporated the opening Bb from the Fourth Symphony into an orchestral piece written for the Leipzig Gwandhaus Orchestra. This new work uses the same instrumentation as the Ninth Symphony (with additional percussion) and quotes the opening sextuplet from the first movement of the symphony. As I had the possibility of incorporating a choir, the connection to the Ninth is also found in the poetry that will be sung: I chose various ideologically engaged texts by Schiller (poetic texts not taken from his dramatic works), which could even be considered vindictive, but that I treat in a more abstract, more contemplative manner; texts that are sometimes short, sometimes long, and use a particular prosody each time, each of which infers a different type of orchestration, infers a particular sonority. The choice of these poems can thus be considered as the first compositional act. ?This work (…) follows a first cantata with texts by Rilke and a second cantata with texts by Leopardi.??
Bruno Mantovani? (from an interview by C. Wasselin)

 

(Chatillon-sous-Bagneux, 1974)
After studying at the Paris Conservatoire where he won five first prizes (analysis, aesthetic, orchestration, composition, history music), he participated in computer courses at IRCAM. Then he began an international career, and collaborated with prestigious soloists (Michel Dalberto, Barbara Hendricks, Paul Meyer, Emmanuel Pahud, Jean-Guihen Queyras), conductors (Pierre Boulez, Laurent Cuniot, Péter Eötvös, Laurence Equilbey, Gunter Herbig, Bernhard Kontarsky, Emmanuel Krivine, Jonathan Nott, François-Xavier Roth), ensembles (Alternanc Accentus, InterContemporain, TM +, Danel quartet), and orchestras (Bamberg, Chamber Philharmonic, Frankfurt Radio, Academy of Lucerne orchestra Paris, Saarbrücken Radio). His catalog, including some fifty pieces, covers multiple genres, from opera to solo. His works have been programmed in concert halls as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Cologne Philharmonie, the KKL in Lucerne, the auditorium of the radio of Madrid, La Scala in Milan, the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, Carnegie Hall and the Lincoln Center in New York La Cité de la musique, the Salle Gaveau and Theatre des Champs Elysees in Paris. He received several awards in international competitions (Stuttgart 1999, Tribune of Composers of the Unesco in 2001),the prizes Georges Enesco and Hervé Dugardin of SACEM in 2000 and 2005, the André Caplet Institute Prize in 2005, the Belmont Prize of the Foundation Forberg-Schneider in 2007, and numerous awards for his record recordings (including two "favorites" from the Charles Cros Academy). He is in residence at the festival iOctober in Normandy for its 2001 edition, in Bologna as part of the "Villa Medicis hors les murs" of the AFAA in 2002, the Academy of France in Rome (Villa Medicis) in 2004 - 2005, Besançon Festival for his 2006 and 2007 editions. Musica festival has dedicated a portrait in 2006 on the creation of the L'Autre coté, an opera composed in collaboration with librettist François Regnault, for seven singers, chorus, percussion soloists and orchestra. His works are published by the editeurs Henry Lemoine.

NOTICE
The notion of conflict has been central to my concerns since I have been writing music. It has fed both my taste for the type of concerto, but also for spatialization. In recent years, I have tried to synthesize these two axes in the writing of pieces in which the solo part was assigned to various instruments of the same nature. Here, two violas are honored. In this long work (35 minutes), the two instruments operate either in a logic of fusion (homorhythmic) or in the fast relay that creates the illusion of a single melodic line led by the passage of a sound (joined with a space) to another. The conflict is also on a formal level, since some materials are presented juxtaposed, without any logic other than the search for contrast. By a set of returns, the form that finds its coherence is also based on an economy of means. Commissioned by Radio France, Orchestre Philharmonique de Liège and the WDR, the concerto is dedicated to its two creators Tabea Zimmermann and Antoine Tamestit.
Bruno Mantovani, Editions Lemoine