| Instrumentalists: | Orchestra del Teatro La Fenice, Ensemble Modern |
|---|---|
| Violin: | Leonidas Kavakos |
| Conductor: | Tito Ceccherini |
| In collaboration with: | Fondazione Teatro La Fenice |
Music
Rebecca Saunders / Unsuk Chin
| Teatro La Fenice | Details |
Rebecca Saunders - Wound
Cut, tear, break, rip open, pierce the skin or flesh; mortify, grieve, offend. Of violence, disfigured and defaced. A lesion ingrained on the marred skin, a mark of difference. The imperfect surface, frayed edges, cracks in the veneer. The implication of vulnerability: the exquisite fragility and imperfection that makes us human. Silence is the canvas on which the weight of sound leaves its mark. Sound rips open the surface of silence, or peels back its skin, zooms in, and falls into the netherworld, seeking that which lies within.
“This corporal revenge. A genuine, concerted and systematic undoing of grace. Every promise discovered too late to be a fucking lie told badly. The promise of intimacy and the promise of beauty ripped away to reveal a gawping, hyperreal brute... Every follicle a valve or a thin brass pipe in some vast, breathing instrument... I wanted to speak of a cursive comprised of a single, sweeping line—written in skin, on skin and under skin; a line of dead, tinted, coiled skin, drawn on to the most sensitive ground. Held in place in raw, dermic proximity.”
Rebecca Saunders
Unsuk Chin - Violin Concert no.2 Scherben der Stille
My Violin Concerto no. 2 is a subjective portrait of, and a dialogue with, Kavakos’ musicianship, which is burningly intense, and, at the same time, impeccable and completely focused.
It is cast in one movement: the solo violin part forms the foundation of the whole work; the soloist triggers all of the orchestra’s actions and impulses. The work also features a composed solo cadenza that is very virtuosic. The music is rich in contrast: the musical fabric emerges from utter silence but – hence the title of the work – juxtaposed seamlessly with rough edges, tonal shards and incisive outbursts from which new shapes appear.
A small motivic cell of five musical notes (or, to be more precise, two notes embellished by three natural harmonics) that soon turns into a line, a phrase, forms the creative nucleus of this piece, and it appears all over, in a variety of shapes and characters.
Unsuk Chin