Hèctor Parra, "Avant la fin... vers où ?"
With his new large-scale symphonic work (commissioned by the Orquesta nacional de España and the Orchestre national de Lille), Hèctor Parra confirms his fascinating originality, bringing into play a sculptural sense of sound material and an irrepressible desire for story-telling. It is impossible not to think of Gustav Mahler, likewise a writer of symphonic works that have the scope of a “telluric novel”. Since his time, however, the implacable fatefulness of the Viennese has been replaced for our contemporaries by a despairing artistic attempt to reconcile the physics of the infinitely small and the general relativity of the infinitely huge. This matter is far from being resolved …
“A large-scale symphonic piece, Avant la fin… vers où ? (2017), 35 minutes in length, explores a sound-world built from textures – lines and planes often extreme and polyphonic, but which can also be relatively sparse – that must be seen more like the contours of a landscape than the surface of the skin. It is in this way that an atmosphere of mystery, at times disturbing, can at any one moment be juxtaposed with very tender, intimate passages, or passages with a terrific sonic power, sometimes full of bitterness and cruelty, sometimes heroic and expansive.
Avant la fin… vers où ? is loosely inspired by the monodrama Te craindre en ton absence, the first musical theatre project I created with Marie NDiaye. It is a journey into the inner depths of a woman at a turning point in her life, a stifled scream in the face of the exasperating futility of her sterile existence and the extreme fragility of her condition. Thus, through the cyclical time-frame developed in this new orchestral piece, we discover little by little our own inner world, via labyrinthine passages where our memories confront increasingly intimate feelings, until monstrous shadows are produced.”
Hèctor Parra
Hèctor Parra - Avant la fin... vers où ?
for big orchestra
World premiere: April 21, 2018
Auditorio Nacional de Música - Madrid, Espagne
Orquesta Nacional de España
David Afkham, conductor
French premiere:
Auditorium le Nouveau siècle (Lille): February 3, 2022
Le Phénix (Valencienne): February 4, 2022
Lys Arena (Comines): February 5, 2022
Orchestre National de Lille
Ludovic Morlot, conductor
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