French Musicatreize plays with music and words

By Izabel Deuff

JAKARTA (JP): For superstitious people, "thirteen" is usually considered a number signifying misfortune. As far as Musicatreize (music played by thirteen people) is concerned, the number has brought it luck.

After performing in prestigious places such as the Theater of Champs-Elysees in Paris, the National Auditorium of Music in Madrid and Grenade and the Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow, the French instrumental and vocal Musicatreize ensemble will play for the first time in Asia for Art summit Indonesia II, 1998: Performing Arts.

The ensemble has been honored several times by French music critics and awarded some distinctions for its performances and recordings.

Founded in 1987 by Roland Hayrabedian, Musicatreize is composed of a core of 12 soloists but can welcome 16 to 24 singers, depending on the pieces it plays.

Thanks to this protean and flexible structure, the Musicatreize repertoire ranges from baroque to contemporary compositions: it includes Maurice Ohana's Nuit de Pouchkine (Pouchkine's Night), La Puerta de la Luz (The Door to Light) by Patrick Burgan, Cinq Rechants (Five Songs) by Olivier Messian, as well as the 14th symphony by Dimitri Chostakovitch.

Conducted by Hayrabedian, Musicatreize will perform a program entitled Humoristique at Taman Ismail Marzuki Art Center in Central Jakarta, on Friday and Saturday.

"The name of the program chosen for the Indonesian Art Summit is Humoristique because its pieces are "music to play with", pieces which play on words, vocal feats and echoing effects", said Marthe Lemut, in charge of public relations for the ensemble.

Concentrating on compositions from the 20th century, Musicatreize was honored to be invited by the festival which is "obviously very open-minded about foreign ensembles", said Marthe.

She added that playing a contemporary repertoire is a way to make this music more widely known to the public.

Albeit Hayrabedian is well known for interpreting Maurice Ohana's music, whose consecration of its success comes from the opera La Clestine (1983). This concert will not display any of his works but those by Luciano Berio, Luigi Dallapiccola, Goffredo Petrassi, Annette Schlnz and Ivo Malec.

Of these five composers, Berio is the most famous. Born in 1925, this Italian musician is famed for his works combining lyric and expressive musical qualities with the most avant-garde electronic techniques. Musicatreize will perform his Cris de Londres (London's Cries).

Berio was greatly influenced by Luigi Dallapiccola (1904- 1975), another Italian composer who was his teacher in the 1950s in the United States. His vocal works are famous for being written in Latin and for the imaginative effects of pronunciation that Musicatreize will demonstrate singing Due Cori di Michelangelo Buonarotti (Two Chorus of Michelangelo Buonarotti) by this composer.

The ensemble will also participate in the Nonsense of Petrassi who set poems by Edward Lear to music. His pieces are plays on voices and are reminiscent of the Commedia dell'arte tradition. The following is one of the epigrams they will sing:

It was an old woman in Pozzillo

Whose chin ended in a pin point.

She had it filed for many hours,

Bought a harp

And played with its chin everywhere in Pozzillo.

Ornithoposie, dating from 1989, is also poetry set to music. Schlnz chose to compose music for Pierre Garnier's poems: this piece is made up of 13 songs using five to 11 different tones and favored murmurs, whisperings and breaths.

Musicatreize will close the concert by performing Dodcameron, a piece composed in 1970 by Malec. As the title suggests, it is a piece for 12 people and is divided into 12 parts. But Ivo Malec explained that "the most important person is the 13th one who conducts the piece." He added that "a kind of playful spirit, free and improvised may be understood in some parts of the piece as a tribute to Boccaccio (an Italian poet from the 14th century who wrote Decameron)."