DIFFRACTIONS

Listening journeys: an original form imagined by TM+

For the past few seasons, TM+ has presented a series of singular performances, each arranged in its own unique form. The pieces featured enter in dialog without interruption, be it by applause or stage changes. The audience embarks on a listening journey that blurs all frontiers, striving to reveal the profound uniqueness of each piece – be they from the past, the present or from elsewhere.

The musicians, who do not play all pieces but at times listen to their partners, join the audience in a common focus, a shared complicity of emotion when discovering the programme. The well-known pieces appear under a completely different light, and the pieces discovered, on the other hand, sound strangely familiar.

Superorganism by Justine Emard

On stage, the eye listens to a mobile sound sculpture, the ear gazes upon the suspended glass sculptures and the shimmer of the instruments. Diffractions is no exception to the uninterrupted flow chosen for the Listening journeys, but is an enhanced version of it. Focal point of this performance, the encounter of plastic artist Justine Emard’s visual world and of the sound realm of the composer Helena Tulve tends to transfigure both practices. Through the images of Superorganism, the French artist immerses us in a troubling experience; she lays out a poetic path through digital networks and intelligent artifice. With music so tangible it can almost be felt rustling on the skin, the Estonian composer paints a natural world, a realm of organic ramifications and of matter gleaming with elemental energy.

Between both artists, the programme unfurls in oscillating circles around the nocturnal song of a recorded nightingale and of Tristan Murail’s Rossignol en amour – its transposed, dilated derivative for the piano. It passes through the greys and the imaginary heathlands of Olivier Messian’s Courlis cendré, and by the flight of the crows toppling space and time in Philippe Leroux’s Postlude à l’épais. It rises at dawn with Ravel’s slightly oriental Trio, it quavers in the Far Eastern vapours of Lou Harrison’s Varied Trio. It plays on the woes of our predator civilisation; it promises, between ear and eye, Helena Tulve’s creation and Justine Emard’s mobiles, a cascade of resonance and reflection upon our nature and ambiguity.