The Percussions de Strasbourg wish you a wonderful year 2023 and send you their best wishes. For us, the year is off to a great start with some very beautiful musical moments in prospect. The first event of the year will be in Dresden with MUSIC IN THE BELLY, a re-reading of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Music Im Bauch (1975) by Simon Steen-Andersen, which was premiered last September during the Musica festival. The other creation that marked 2022, La Fête Sauvage, a film-concert composed by Lucie Antunes, will also be performed at the Valence national stage. In Strasbourg, the ensemble is already back for a new “Live at Home” with Burning Bright, a masterpiece by composer and friend Hugues
Dufourt, on 9 February at the Théâtre de Hautepierre. Finally, our legendary Percustra workshops are finally starting this month! We hope to see you on some great shows!
Minh-Tâm Nguyen, Artistic Director
MUSIC IN THE BELLY
Karlheinz Stockhausen / Simon Steen-Andersen
Thursday 19th January 2023, Hellerau, Dresden (DE)
In 1975 Karlheinz Stockhausen composed an enigmatic work for les Percussions de Strasbourg. The score contained more stage directions than music – and the music consisted of twelve melodies linked to the signs of the zodiac, the Tierkreis cycle, and embodied in music boxes that the composer had made himself. The idea for the piece and its title came from his daughter Julika’s surprise when, at the age of two, she discovered small noises inside her, stomach rumbling: “You have music in your belly”, told his father. A few years later, he suddenly woke up one morning after dreaming the piece and put it down on paper. Nearly fifty years after the composition and premiere of the work at the Royan Festival, les Percussions de Strasbourg have asked Simon Steen-Andersen to imagine a new interpretation and staging. While remaining faithful to the score and without changing a single note, the Danish artist proposes his vision of the work’s potential for the eyes and ears of today through the use of simple scenic concepts and technologies directly inspired by other pieces by Stockhausen. A simple question guided Steen-Andersen’s approach: what could MUSIC IN THE BELLY have looked and sounded like inside Stockhausen’s dream, even before he woke up?
Thursday 19 January 2023, 8pm
Hellerau, Dresden (DE)
More information about the show
Information and booking
Video teaser
La Fête Sauvage
Cinema-concert by Frédéric Rossif, composition Lucie Antunes
Wednesday 25 January 2023, Le Lux, Scène Nationale, Valence (FR)
Wednesday 25 January 2023, 8pm
Le Lux, Scène Nationale, Valence (FR)
More information about the show
Information and booking
Video teaser
Burning Bright
Hugues Dufourt
Thursday 9 February 2023, Theater of Hautepierre, Strasbourg (FR)
The Percussions de Strasbourg present one of the masterpieces of their repertoire: Burning Bright by Hugues Dufourt, composer and philosopher, notably a pupil of Gilles
Deleuze and a faithful accomplice of the ensemble. Written in 2014, performed many times since and awarded a Victoire de la Musique in 2017, Burning Bright takes its name from the poem The Tyger by William Blake. Like Blake’s poem, Burning Bright is informed by images of tigers ‘blazing in the forests of the night’. This piece, ‘a drama without narrative or anecdote’, mobilises the whole world of percussion, from the Chinese cymbal to the Trinidadian steel drums, in a splendid ordering of primary energies and in a vast and disturbing climate. Divided into twelve movements but conceived in one piece, “like an immense adagio in the manner of Bruckner” in the words of the composer, the music rises up in coloured layers, in quivering layers, unfolding in its own fields of resonance. He concludes: “The immense space that we discover, a space in the style of Kubrick, could well become, despite the hopes of our time, that of an eternal confinement.
Thursday 9 February, 8pm
Théâtre de Hautepierre, Strasbourg (FR)
More information about the show
Information about the event
Tickets l Facebook event
Mediation activities
• FOR SCHOOL GROUPS AND ASSOCIATIONS
Around our Strasbourg concerts, mediation activities are carried out in order to discover the worlds of the composers and the ensemble, but also to practice percussion with the musicians.
- SCHOOL CONCERTS AT THE HAUTEPIERRE THEATRE
Burning Bright, Hugues Dufourt
for secondary school students – Wednesday 8 February, 10-11am
for primary schools students – Thursday 9 February, 10-11am
- PRACTICE WORKSHOPS
Around Burning Bright
For association groups: Wednesday 1 February 2023
For school groups: Thursday 2 February
- INSTRUMENTARIUM TOURS
Around Burning Bright
For association groups: Wednesday 25 January
For school groups: Thursday 26 January, Friday 27 January
Details and information l rp[@]percussionsdestrasbourg.com
• THE PERCUSTRA WORKSHOPS
This season’s Percustra workshops take you into the world of composer Hugues Dufourt through his piece Sombre Journée, composed for the ensemble in 1979, which plays on the distorting mirroring of flows, densities and acoustic volumes. Led by Thibaut Weber and Hyoungkwon Gil, soloists of the ensemble, in the instrumentarium of the Percussions de Strasbourg, these workshops end with a concert on the stage of the Théâtre de Hautepierre, an opportunity for the participants to show the work carried out throughout the year under professional conditions. Designed as a place of experimentation and discovery, these workshops will allow you to create your own musical language.
⚠ Our Percustra 2023 workshops start at the end of January! The Tuesday evening adult workshops are fully booked. There are still a few places left for the children’s workshop (5-6 years old), on Saturday morning. Hurry up and sign up!
Details and information l rp[@]percussionsdestrasbourg.com