ENSEMBLE CAIRN: From wind sounds to electricity

Program:

- Tellur :: Tristan Murail (12’)
for classical guitar

- Tañer el viento :: Daniel-Alvarado Bonilla (8')
for accordion and classical guitar

- Kika Pou :: Jérôme Combier (7’)
for microtonal accordion and electronics

- Trash TV trance :: Fausto Romitelli (11')
for solo electric guitar

- Intermission -

- Sundowning :: Lily Chen (7')
for accordion and classical guitar

  - Dhatar :: Sanchez Verdu (6' )
for accordion and classical guitar

- Innersonic :: Franck Bedrossian (11’)
for accordion and electric guitar


In French, the accordion is often called “le piano du pauvre” (piano of poor people). The guitar is probably the symbol of a “popular” instrument, and has always been so since Renaissance until today. We know that Schubert -- and after him Berlioz -- used to play guitar, even if they never wrote for it (except one or two attempts). What about today? How can classical music (music based on writing concepts) explore these two instruments, and how can it find a way in front of the popular repertoire that the accordion and guitar symbolize?

Cairn ensemble propose a chamber music concert that combines different possibilities of listening to those instruments which step by step become more and more present in the contemporary repertoire.

More or less, traditional music appears during this concert, sometime very clearly: the rock guitar in Tras TV trance by Fausto Romitelli; noise music in Innersonic by Franck Bedrossian, sometimes hidden; Russian and traditional music in Ki-Ka-Pou by Jérôme Combier…

Constructed as a development, the concert starts with acoustic sounds, and step by step converts itself into an electric world, leading the audience from recognizable sounds until immateriality and incredible mixing sonorities.

Ensemble Cairn
A cairn is a small pile of stones found in the mountains. It serves as a signpost or path for those that venture there, and each passer-by adds his or her stone to the pile. This was probably our own wish, too: to create the feeling, during our concerts, of a listening path, to put quite different types of music side by side, to allow audiences to hear the cohesion among the members of the Cairn ensemble, to put together programmes that are like objects themselves, like musical compositions.

Cairn Ensemble has existed since 1998. Jérôme Combier is its artistic director, and Guillaume Bourgogne its musical director. Cairn Ensemble's intention is to create high-quality contemporary music concerts. Some of Cairn's concerts confront other art forms, such as the plastic arts, photography and video, as well as other types of music such as jazz, improvisation and traditionnal music. The Cairn ensemble wishes to be a group that has a conductor as well as a group that gives rigorous performances of chamber music.

Today Cairn is based in Région-Centre Val de Loire and in residency at the National Theater of Orléans. It is supported by La Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles and by Le Conseil Régional as a National and International Ensemble. From 2006 to 2009 Cairn was in residency at the Royaumont Abbey, Cairn as been the guest of famous festivals including Manifeste (Ircam), Musica (Strasbourg), Archipel (Geneva), Festival d'Automne à Paris, Tage für Neue Musik (Zurich), Darmstadt Ferienkurse (Germany), Borealis (Norway), Ars Musica (Belgium) as well as the Villa Medici (Italy). Cairn worked with many composers and has done many world premieres. Gérard Pesson, Tristan Murail, Philippe Leroux, Thierry Blondeau, Raphaël Cendo, Jean-Luc Hervé, Francesco Filidei, Noriko Baba, Franck Bedrossian, Philippe Schœller, Marc Ducret, John Hollenbeck, Cristina Branco, Alban Richard, Pierre Nouvel are exemples of important relations for the Ensemble.

Cairn has recorded works by Olivier Schneller (Wergo) and by Thierry Blondeau, Raphaël Cendo for the Æon label, and was awarded the Grand Prix du disque of Charles Cros Accademy for its recording of Jérôme Combier's cycle Vies silencieuses.

Fanny Vicens - accordion

The accordionist and pianist Fanny Vicens, an award winner of Yehudi Menuhin Foundation (Stuttgart), is one of the most unusual musicians of her generation. Her advanced studies in performance, pedagogy and musicology between 2003 and 2014 led her to the Sorbonne University, the Paris Conservatoire Supérieur and the Musikhochschulen of Trossingen, Germany and Luzern, Switzerland; her principal teachers were Hugo Noth, Hans Maier, Anne-Maria Hölscher, Denis Pascal and Reinhard Becker.

Fanny bases her performances on a deep understanding of the repertoires she plays (she won the Sacem Analysis Prize at the age of 14), and has been appearing on international concert platforms since an early age. Her programs reflect not only her commitment to contemporary music and premieres, but also her lively interest  for historically informed performance of the keyboard music the 15th until 18th centuries.

Fanny Vicens has appeared as a soloist and a chamber player at leading venues in a variety of countries (L’Arsenal in Metz, Cité de la Musique, the Odessa Philharmonie, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, the KKL Lucerne, the Pollini Auditorium in Padova, etc.). She is also a frequent ensemble player, and has performed with over thirty European ensembles including l'Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Modern, l'Itinéraire, Cairn, and among others.

She also appears as a soloist in concertos for accordion and piano, playing the works of Françaix, Nordheim, Haas, Constant, and Chengbi An on the former, and of Mozart and Chostakovitch on the latter, with the Orchestre National de Lorraine, the Orchestre de Bretagne, the Orchestre Perpignan Méditerranée, le Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain, and the Kammerorchester Pforzheim.

Fanny has premiered works by Johannes Kalitzke, Stefano Gervasoni, Frédéric Pattar, Marco Suarez, Jérôme Combier, and Oscar Bianchi, as well as those of many composers of her generation, with whom she regularly reflects on the accordion’s identity. She has also mastered an extensive repertoire with electronics, and recently collaborated on the building of the first quarter tone accordion in France. Her multi-disciplinary projects include work with the choreographer Maud Le Pladec and the X.A.M.P. duo with Jean-Etienne Sotty

She was an award winner in the Bechstein Piano Competition and the Deutscher Hochschulwettbewerb; her work has also received support from the DAAD, the Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg, Mécénat Musical Société Générale, and the Fondation Iris Marquardt.

Christelle Séry - guitar
She starts music and guitar with Ako Ito & Henri Dorigny in Nice and studies further at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris (prizes in guitar, chamber music, pedagogy).

Thanks to her musical studies, her earlier scene experience and thanks to different meetings, she focuses to the contemporary repertoire, the performing arts, improvised and amplified musics.

Guitarist of the Ensemble Cairn since it was founded in 1997, she also plays with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, in festivals such as Agora (Ircam-Centre Pompidou), Festival d'Automne à Paris (Cité de la musique), Why Note, Archipels, Clip & Clap (musée du Louvre), Musica, Täge für Neue Musik, Voix Nouvelles, Ars Musica, Musiques de notre temps, Music Forum of Taipei, INTER/actions of Bangor (UK), Tokyo Spring Festival, New Music Week Festival in Shanghai.

She performed in shows mixing music (written or improvised) with poetry, theatre, video or dance, such as l'Atelier du Plateau fait son cirque, Tangos slams et coplas by Miguel Angel Sevilla, Set pour 7 femmes by François Raffinot, several shows directed by Ludovic Montet, K Lear by Marie Montegani, Territoires de l’âme by Jonathan Pontier, Doux Mix et Léger Sourire, Up to 1970 Miles by Serge Adam, Le Nerf by Guillaume Malvoisin, Une petite histoire de l'Opéra and Chanson Politique by Laurent Dehors, Journal d'une apparition (words by Robert Desnos), Liszt et l'Italie and Etude de fesses directed by Projet Bloom, Le Gouffre d'en haut by Françoise Toullec with l'Archipel Nocturne...

She plays in solo two specific projects : "Pages acoustiques" and "Pages électriques".

The concert is sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

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Saturday, October 28, 2017, 8:00pm to 10:00pm
1750 Arch St.
Berkeley, CA
94709
US
This Event is Free and Open to the Public