From February 13 to 17, the Latvian Music Academy (LMA) will host the Contemporary Music Festival “deciBels” for the ninth time. The focus of this year’s festival will be the performance of the electro-acoustic opus “La legende d’Eer” by the Greek-born avant-garde composer and architect Janis Xenaks.
The festival will be opened on February 13 in the LMA chamber hall by the concert of the laureates of the Fourth Contemporary Chamber Music Interpreters Competition “Skat(!)Logs” of the music secondary school. Similar to “deciBel”, one of the goals of which is to activate LMA students for the interpretation of contemporary music, “Skat(!)Logs” invites music high school students to focus on this goal.
On February 14, the opening concert of the festival will be held in the LMA’s Great Hall with the 46-minute long electro-acoustic work “La legende d’Eer” (“The Myth of an Era”) by Janis Xenaks, an avant-garde composer and architect of Greek origin, who has just celebrated his centenary.
Xenakis created this composition in the late 1970s for the opening event of the Center Pompidou. The piece is the soundtrack to a show called ‘Le Diatope’. The performance took place in a specific architectural structure of a curved shape, which was created according to the project of Xenak. The visual component was also created independently, consisting of 1,600 light bulbs and four lasers whose beams were controlled by 400 rotatable mirrors. In 2021, the instructors of the Music Technology Department of the Sibelius Academy created a version of this work, in which the original light concept is replaced by smart lighting control from a computer. As part of the “deciBels” festival, the interpretation of “La legende d’Eer” will be under the supervision of Mariannes Decosteras-Taivalkoski, Alejandro, Alejandro Montes de Oca Torres and lighting artist Jurģ Ozols.
On February 15, a portrait concert of the British composer Jonathan Harvey will be held in the Great Hall of LMA, in which four compositions will be performed: “Advaya” for cello and electronics (Guna Schne – cello, Roberts Flaits – keyboards), “Ricercare una melodia” for trumpet and electronics (Bruno Ančans – trumpet) , “The Riot” (Luca Quaranta – flute, Laima Ratniece-Miltiņa – bass clarinet, Anna Ivanova – piano) and “Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco”, known as the “evergreen” of electronic music, for 4-channel tape.
On February 16, the “Voice” program will be offered in the Great Hall of the LMA, which will feature chamber music voices of Latvian composers and composition students of the LMA, and at the end of the festival on February 17, Darsija James Argyu (one of the most well-known, innovative and interesting modern jazz composers) and the combined LMA will play there big band.
