Genevieve

Swiss composer Heinz Holliger s Machaut-Transkriptionen is comprised of a spacious cycle of pieces written over a ten year period beginning in 2001. An imaginative re-investigation of the work of the great 14th century French composer-poet Guillaume de Machaut, it is scored for four voices and three violas. Note-for-note transcriptions of Machaut give way to Holliger s increasingly creative refractions of the music. As Holliger notes, his in-depth study of Machaut opened up new vistas for his compositional activity and his admiration for the source material is mirrored in the outstanding performances of the violists and singers. The Machaut-Transkriptionen proves a perfect vehicle for the Hilliard Ensemble s skills as interpreters of both old and new music, and this recording, made in 2010 in Zürich, captures the vocal group at the height of its powers.

A diminutive fi gure with a long beard; brilliant but cold compositions; an academic and conservative style: such is the – inaccurate – image that posterity often retains of Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921). In this year of the centenary of his death, Geneviève Laurenceau aims to shed new light on the French composer’s output and introduce us to another Saint-Saëns, whose luminous, warm, elegant writing enabled instruments to sing with a deeply human and virtuosic voice.

The piano of today, nearly unrecognizable from its earliest keyboard predecessors, is a nearly perfect instrument. After hundreds of years of technological advances, the modern keyboard is resilient, producing a beautifully resonant, uniform sound. My work for ZOFO, Altromondo (Italian for “other world” or “another world”) is a piece that works with this “ideal” sounding instrument, and adds a number of other sounds that the piano can make but does not commonly get the opportunity to produce on purpose. These sounds extend from and merge into the additional items that the pianists are required to play.