Éliane Radigue and Arvo Pärt: Tabula Rasa

PROGRAM:

​Arvo PÄRT - TABULA RASA (1977) Éliane RADIGUE - OCCAM DELTA XIII (2019) (US premiere) 

Movses Pogossian, violin (Pärt) Varty Manouelian, violin (Pärt) UCLA Camarades String Ensemble (Pärt) Jonathan Hepfer, conductor (Pärt) ​ Carol Robinson, bass clarinet (Radigue) Hélène Breschand, harp (Radigue) Louis-Michel Marion, double bass (Radigue)

​​"I hope that the future of music is as vast as space itself." - Éliane Radigue

Visiting Éliane Radigue in her apartment in Paris this summer, I was struck by the light. Not only was the apartment filled with natural afternoon light, bright colors and beautiful flowers, but the eyes and demeanor of the woman who inhabited the space seemed herself were positively radiant.  

The term avant-garde typically conjures darkness in my mind; it brings to mind works plumb the depths of the human soul and experience. In the case of Éliane Radigue, it is the opposite; the deeper one goes, the more light one seems to find.  

There is no getting around it: Éliane Radigue's work is just special. At 87, having spent five decades of her life solely composing electronic music (first at the Studio d'Essai in Paris alongside Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry and then later with a synthesizer alongside Morton Subotnik, Rhys Chathama and Laurie Spiegel), Radigue has found herself working solely on works for acoustic instruments since the early 2000s, namely on the ever expanding series OCCAM. ​  What makes Radigue's acoustic works so unique is that they are the deeply personal result of her collaboration with selected instrumentalists. There is no score, except for the verbal transmission between Radigue and her collaborator during rehearsals. This means that only those who have been initiated into this small circle of interpreters may present her work.  

In a special presentation of the US premiere of the composer's recent work OCCAM DELTA XIII, Monday Evening Concerts has the pleasure of presenting three of Radigue's Parisian collaborators: the clarinetist Carol Robinson, the harpist Hélène Breschand and the contrabassist Louis-Michel Marion.  

This work will be paired with Arvo Pärt's sublime Tabula Rasa with the brilliant violin soloists Movses Pogossian and Varty Manouelian. This program celebrates the unsurpassable beauty of simplicity.