June 22, 2010 – LSR – 8PM – VARIATIONS: QUATUOR BOZZINI & BENOIT DELBECQ

QUATUOR BOZZINI

Since its founding in 1999 Quatuor Bozzini has presented new, contemporary, experimental and classical music and has explored with equal eagerness the possibilities of traditional concerts and the ones of avant-garde events. To date, it has commissioned over forty works, and premiered more than a hundred, with a repertoire of more than a hundred composers. The group has distinguished itself through its specific, carefully considered repertoire and its distinct style of playing that pays much attention to details. Its programming seeks to engender productive conversation between strong (if sometimes subtle) creative voices, regardless of their current notoriety or popularity. This utterly contemporary new music ensemble makes its home within an extremely vibrant new music scene, and it is literally carried away by the music it chooses to play. Its performances are brilliant, precise and always inspiring.
Quatuor Bozzini has won three Opus prizes from the Conseil québécois de la musique (CQM): “International Outreach” (2007), “Contemporary Disc of the Year” (2004), and “Discovery of the Year” (2001). It is also the recipient of the Étoile-Galaxie Prize from Radio-Canada (2001), and the German Ernst Von Siemens Musikstiftung (2007). The quartet presents its own annual season of concerts in Montréal, the Série qb, that includes Le Salon des compositeurs (Composers’ Salon) and the Composer’s Kitchen, as well as touring Europe, the US, and Canada, at the invitation of festivals such as MärzMusik (Berlin, Germany), Ultima (Oslo, Norway), Huddersfield (UK), Klangspuren (Austria), Shift (Netherland) and Présences (France). It has also performed at: Deutschlandfunk Forum Neue Music, Klangraum Düsseldorf, Schreyahner Herbst, ADE*vantgarde, ARTlantische Tage, SWR Ars Nova (Germany); Moments Musicaux Aarau (Switzerland); Crash, Mostly Modern Series (Dublin, Ireland); Transart (Italy); Ostrava Music Days (Czech Republic); Nordic Music Days (Iceland); Rikskonserter, Ny Musik (Sweden); BBC Hear and Now (UK); Shift (Amsterdam and Toronto); The Kitchen, Merkin Hall (New York, NY); June in Buffalo, Beethoven Slee Cycle (Buffalo, NY); Calarts (Los Angeles, CA); Montréal/Nouvelles musiques, Domaine Forget (Saint-Irénée, Québec); Music on Main (Vancouver, BC); Music Toronto, and the Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival.

In 2004 the quartet created its own recording label, collection qb, in collaboration with Dame / Actuelle CD. This label gives the quartet and other artists the freedom to record composers such as Steve Reich, Jo Kondo, Howard Skempton, James Tenney, and Malcolm Goldstein, as well as Canadian composers including Jean Lesage, Claude Vivier, Michael Oesterle and Michel Gonneville. The quartet has recorded as well with Wandelweiser (Jürg Frey, 2006), Wergo-Deutscher Musikrat (Thomas Stiegler, 2006) and ATMA Classique and can be heard regularly on both European and Canadian radio.
Lauded for its “intense musicality and immense sensitivity” (Musicworks, Canada), the “phenomenal” Bozzini quartet (Die Zeit, Allemagne) seeks to bring together artists from different horizons, collaboration being the sinews of every artistic creation. With a view toward the future of its field, the quartet also supports the next generation of composers with its annual musical “laboratory,” the Composer’s Kitchen, a week-long workshop and concert event that brings, since 2005, next-wave composers together with mentor composers and members of the quartet. With the participation to numerous residences (Concordia University, June in Buffalo, Théâtre La Chapelle), workshops and master classes the quartet has assured an intensive cooperation with many musicians to whom commissions are but the first step into creativity.

http://www.quatuorbozzini.ca/accueil.e/

BENOIT DELBECQ

Born in 1966, Parisian pianist Benoît Delbecq figures today among the innovators of the international contemporary jazz scene. His reputation and influence have been growing steadily since the early 90’s, and the New York Times recently described him as « an original and unconventional pianist » who « expertly » invents a « serene » music.

An inspired adventurer, a goldsmith of prepared piano and a visionary poet in the art of electronically recycling his own statements, he actively participates in the new aesthetic breakthroughs of today.

A former student of Mal Waldron, Alan Silva, Muhal Richard Abrams and Steve Coleman among others, Benoît’s international profile took off around 1992 from appearances at Paris’s cutting-edge club « Les Instants Chavirés », in parallel with the founding of Kartet, The Recyclers and the Hask Collective, all of which helped revitalize the Paris creative music scene. Since then Benoît has been touring around the globe.

He performs solo piano and solo electronics, leads or co-leads a number of bands from duos to quintets, and is involved in many multi-disciplinary productions of theater, dance, the visual arts, cinema etc. His music features mesmerizing grooves that shake out flashing, lunar melodies. An invitation to a « voyage into a magic land » (Le Monde).

« Prix de la Sacem » in 1995 (with the collective Kartet), Benoît was awarded the « Prix de la Villa Médicis Hors les Murs in 2001 », and has just received the prestigious fellowship of the Civitella Fundation New York (2009).
“Delbecq figures today among the most inventive musicians on the European scene…Enlightened experimenter of a music decidedly personal in the way it links apparently contradictory influences from the freest improvisation and the ultra-sophisticated constructions of contemporary composers such as Ligeti or Conlon Nancarrow, Delbecq has succeeded in transcending this apparent dispersion in a coherent universe, at once limpid and mysterious, that draws its liberty from a conceptional rigour which has few equals in contemporary music….A music of nocturnal poetry, apparently fluid and deceptively slack, all minute shimmerings and the play of braided textures, controls the flows and effects of superimpositions (of intensity, speeds, materials) — something on the order of inspiration. ”

—Stéphane Ollivier, Les Inrockuptibles-2000.

http://www.delbecq.net/
http://www.myspace.com/benoitdelbecq