Music for seven n.3 - 7 contrabass tubas / Yuval Avital

Описание: Seven contrabass tubas recreate an imaginary abandoned port in an original multimedia score dedicated to Björk

Conductor: Antonio Macciomei

Soloists:
Dirk Hirthe (Germany)
Francesco Porta (Italy)
Eros Sabbatani (Italy)
Simon Sailer (Germany)
Giuseppe Scarati (Italy)
Tomohiro Sosogi (Japan)
Maximilian Wagner (Germany)

Thirty-five minutes of musical performance played by seven renowned soloists from Italy, Germany, Japan and Switzerland. A complex metaphor of sound, image and word gathered in an unpublished musical experimentation developed from the impressive timbre of the bass tuba, a little-known instrument for its quality as a solo but certainly endowed with great expressiveness. This is "Un porto grigio" by Yuval Avital, a work dedicated to the Icelandic artist Björk, premiered Sunday, April 27th at the Auditorium "G. Verdi" in Segrate (Milan), as part of the fourth edition of ITALIAN LOW BRASS FESTIVAL.

Third of a series of six compositions, each dedicated to seven identical instruments titled Music for 7, "Un porto grigio" is perhaps the best sign of continuity between multimedia and musical researches carried out by Yuval Avital, the Israeli-born composer that now lives in Milan, considered as one of the most original voices in the European experimental scene .

For those who, in fact, know the artistic career of Avital, developed between large frescoes sound of non-European matrix (above all the impressive GARON for 45 tubas, percussion, choir and electronics made in 2012 on the occasion of the "Dirty Corner" installation by Anish Kapoor in Milan), music with images (OTOT, presented in 2013 as the opening event of the symphonic season of the Teatro Sociale in Como), and music for dance and theatre (Cave Canem by Avi Kaiser and Sergio Antonino, made in Germany in 2007), "Un porto grigio" seems to be an impulse to embrace different languages in a context, the instrumental chamber music, usually just focus on music.

The beginning of the score, a poem by Avital recited during the live performance, evokes the image of the forgotten port of lonely (the port not only as a physical place but a place of the soul, dear to literature and cinema); the presence of icons with a value of emotional amplification of the musical writing makes the score a graphic work in itself; the unusual research about the instrumental expression of the bass tuba (present in Avital's works) is carried out through random and prescriptive processes (with the use of percussive figures, a writing sometimes polyphonic sometimes melodic, and with a rich range of extended techniques that widely defy the mastery of the seven soloists involved): all this leads to think of an icon-sound framework in which each element exists both in itself and as part of a complex artistic and poetic metaphor.

Finally, the graphic and interdisciplinary features of "Un porto grigio", inevitably recalls a recent work of Avital, Noise for Syd, a multimedia Opera dedicated to the tragic story of Syd Barrett, founder of Pink Floyd (premiere at the Teatro Cavallerizza of Reggio Emilia, 2013), in which the artist has used the graphical aspects of the score -- often reserved for the 'technical' sonic aspects as representation of added layers and meanings.

Similar to other pieces of Music for 7, also "Un porto grigio" is dedicated to a protagonist of the music scene that has been an inspiration for Avital, in this case the Icelandic singer Björk. Avital explains: «in my opinion Björk is the perfect singer, her voice and phrasing brings with them vulnerability and strength. She is an artist that expands continuously through deeply original orchestrations, thanks to a personal use of multimedia and visual elements».

The premiere of "Un porto grigio" by Yuval Avital had taken place in Segrate, Italy on April 27th, 2014 as a closing event of the 4th edition of the ITALIAN LOW BRASS FESTIVAL, entirely dedicated to low instruments of the brass family. The concert have been possible thanks to the efforts of the Artistic Director of the Festival, the virtuoso tuba player Eros Sabbatini (and 1st tuba of this work), already engaged in the past in the repertoire of Avital with the works GARON and Noise for Syd.