Chris Swithinbank

In Sep­tem­ber, I at­tended the ‘Voix nou­velles’ res­i­dency pro­gramme at Fon­da­tion Roy­au­mont (as ev­i­denced by this splen­did pho­to­graph) and in the process wrote All the time that you have what we have. / All the time that you have. for so­prano Marie Pi­caut of Les Cris de Paris and Quatuor Di­o­tima’s vi­o­lin­ists Yun­Peng Zhao and Guil­laume La­tour. You can now lis­ten to the record­ing of their per­for­mance given dur­ing the clos­ing con­cert by click­ing on the player above.

It is a some­what un­usual work for me in that its pri­mary ap­proach could be said to be one of draw­ing more on a per­for­mance art con­text. Though it re­mains music, the work gath­ers a dra­matic as­pect (that is pos­si­bly lost in the record­ing, I can’t tell) in being built around the ex­haus­tion of breath and bow. The per­form­ers’ strug­gle to main­tain pres­ence and ex­pres­sion against nat­ural phys­i­cal lim­its shapes the sonic ma­te­r­ial, ar­riv­ing at sound qual­i­ties that would prob­a­bly oth­er­wise be avoided, and — I think/hope — lends it a new mean­ing.