The Groupe de Recherches Musicales in concert in Paris. Pierre Gervasoni · Le Monde · 10 January 2006.
At Groupe de Recherches Musicales concerts, “sound trees”—branching coat-stand-like structures extended with black spheres or white cylinders—rise among the audience. On 7 January at Paris’s Maison de Radio France, a battalion of laptops joined them, distributed between hall, for composers taking turns at the mixing desk, and stage, for performers using computerised score-following. The evening celebrated live electronics: transforming sound in real time.
The Itinéraire ensemble musicians explored infinitely rich spheres, as the first three works showed. Florence Baschet’s violin solo BogenLied experimented with processing the bow’s principal inflections with genuine plastic felicity. Pierre Jodlowski’s In & Out combined violin, cello and video with astonishing virtuosity.
Premiered here, Jacopo Baboni Schilingi’s Spatio intermisso (temporis) resembled a spectacular crescendo, with electronics sounding like whale song enveloping an increasingly unrestrained oboe monologue.
The two composers programmed after the interval, like Jodlowski and Baboni Schilingi, were born in the 1970s and belong to the generation that grew up with software, the natural live-electronics generation. That does not guarantee mastery. Geoffroy Drouin uses it impersonally and erratically in the trumpet solo Crispy Grain. Grégoire Lorieux employs it with anecdotal spareness in the premiere of Langage de l’ombre for female voice and ensemble.
Maison de Radio France, Paris, 7 January.