During the third week of May, Donemus will cooperate with the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra, the Latvian State Choir and the New Music Festival Arena in a recording project and concert of the two major works of Bernard Benoliel. René Gulikers will be the conductor for this project.
Bernard Benoliel (1943-2017) visited Donemus a couple of times. His oeuvre contains fifteen opus works that were recently all published at Donemus. He wrote a Symphony, String Quartet and three Piano Sonatas. In addition, he completed a cycle of four experimental works featuring an amplified solo stringed instrument and amplified antiphonal instrumental forces. These include his magnum opus, the fifty-minute Infinity-Edge, A Transcendental Requiem, which reached its final form in 2014.
René Gulikers:
The main common features of Bernard Benoliel’s only orchestral works, the “Sinfonia Cosmologica” and “Infinity – Edge, A Transcendental Requiem”, are their monumentality and dark timbre. Complex chords in the low register of the orchestra, a stream of polyphonic voices and the characteristic sound of 12-tone music, create in both works a musical primal force, such as one only finds in Benoliel.
The symphony is based on two 12-tone series. The first is present from the beginning by means of a hexachord that has the atmosphere of a dominant seventh chord, and a melodic theme formed by the last six notes of the series. The second series, in contrast to the first, is not shown in its entirety, but shows a regularly recurring motive of three notes. The most remarkable aspect of this work is the constant presence of sound: the work is composed in such a way that all the different instrumental voices and chords are seamlessly connected. For 25 minutes, one is completely immersed in a wonderful world of never-repeating harmonies and textures. In the monumental finale, there is the only exception: in the final bars, two different chords are played three times in succession.
The requiem, which was composed more than 10 years after the symphony, consists of two parts and is based on a text by Nietzsche (part 1) and a text of Benoliel’s own as a reflection on it (part 2). The first three measures of the piece, played by the solo-violin, show a 12-tone series. However, the rules of the dodecaphony are not so strict anymore. Measures, passages and motives from the original series – transposed or not – are repeated and besides that, Benoliel makes use of rests in the music. Here, too, we hear dark chords. The rhythmics in the polyphony are even more complex than in the symphony. The two antiphonal choirs sing the text in fragments that usually start from the depths of the basses and fan out to the highest registers in the sopranos, supported by the brass or the strings from the orchestra. Via an infinite sequence of beautiful timbres and intense atmospheres, we are brought – after almost one hour – to the breath-taking ending: the angels sing, the heavens open up …..
See the score of the Sinfonia Cosmologica in the Donemus catalogue
See the score of the Infinity-Edge: A Transcendental Requiem in the Donemus catalogue
Composers in the crosshairs of our attention