Luciano Berio Black is the Colour aus Folk Songs
Patricia Alessandrini Omaggio a Berio
Claude Debussy Chansons de Bilitis Szenische Musik zu 12 Gedichten von Pierre Louÿs
Patricia Alessandrini Menus morceaux par un autre moi réunis
Arnold Schönberg Verklärte Nacht
Patricia Alessandrini Forklaret Nat

Even when she was very young, the Italian-American composer Patricia Alessandrini, found the omnipresent need to divide music up and pigeon-hole it in stylistic terms claustrophobic. She always felt obliged to be what others had projected onto her. She then discovered a quotation from Gerhard Richter that perfectly encapsulated her unease: ›style is an act of violence, and I am not violent‹. This inspired her to shift her focus from music’s central, style-defining properties to more peripheral events. She now works with recordings of composers from the past which she re-examines with regard to their background in order to »erase« all their musical properties. She takes only incidental noises, overtones and traces of expression in their performances, analyses these on a computer and devises new compostions from them.

In this concert in the Salzlager, the programme features three original compsitions that  the Ensemble Modern juxtaposes with Alessandrini’s responses: a Folk Song by Luciano Berio, to whom she pays homage in her own way; Debussy’s Chansons de Bilitis, whose gender issues she highlights by giving the courtesan Bilitis her own voice back; and Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht, based on a poem by Richard Dehmel, which Alessandrini folds into and superimposes upon her own piece Forklaret Nat, in order to lend it a more appropriate and timely dramaturgy.