Live video: Buxtehude and Dayer with Gli Angeli Genève

In October 2021 I had the great pleasure to be a part of a concert tour and CD recording with Gli Angeli Genève, where I finally got to play Buxtehude’s magical work Membra Jesu Nostri with a truly marvellous cast of singers and instrumentalists.

Also, we performed the composition “Afin que le lion feroce n’attaque pas” by Xavier Dayer (1972), commissioned by Stephan MacLeod for his ensemble and for this particular project.
It was an interesting experience to play contemporary music with a baroque ensemble. Some of us, including myself, had done a lot of this repertoire in the past, while others hadn’t.
As baroque musicians we are used to playing with a bass line that almost always provides the rhythmical and harmonic structure - in this case it was absent, of course. We got to see the normal distribution of the roles in the ensemble, including the role of the conductor, in a completely different light, and discovered qualities of each other we didn’t know yet.
For this piece, we were joined by five wind players from Ensemble Contrechamps, Geneva’s most famous contemporary music ensemble. Their approach of the piece was of course very different from ours, and it was a great and inspiring learning experience to perform with them.

Here’s a link to the concert we played on October 17, 2021 in Pontoise. The CD is still on its way.

(One funny note for very attentive listeners: during this concert my e string broke. This is quite a normal thing and before the concert, in a very humid church, I had the strong feeling that it could happen to me that day. And so it did.)