Ictus - Georges-Elie Octors

The Japanese pianist and composer Toshio Hosokawa (b. 1955) is a living bridge between Japanese and Western music on the one hand and between old and new musical traditions on the other. He knows the traditional Japanese styles - gagaku and Nô theatre - very well and borrows from them his slow tempos and rubatos, which form the ritual tapestries of sound and the contemplative character of his music. In his music, he uses a predominantly Western armamentarium. His compositions include references to Luigi Nono, Giacinto Scelsi and Helmut Lachenmann. His oeuvre includes orchestral works, concertos and chamber music, but also music for traditional Japanese instruments and film scores. In this concert, Ictus intends to take an almost symphonic plunge into Hosokawa's world. In his 'Medea Overture', a preliminary study for his opera 'Vision of Lear', he seeks musical links with the great Romantic themes of the nineteenth century. Ictus combines this piece with two recent compositions, 'Voyage III' and 'Voyage V', which can both be considered true concertos. Finally, 'Herbst-Lied' may be the most characteristic of Hosokawa's newest compositions, containing harmonies from German Romanticism as though they were distant and inaccessible memories.