pour flûte solo et ensemble de 15 musiciens
In the last stages of sleep, the brain assembles with haste a large collection of images that will form what we “remember” of a dream. Even if we have a vivid memory of them just after waking up, dreams are very volatile and we quickly forget most of the details and end up with extremely flaky explanations of the events that supposedly took place. Dreams are very illusive: they have their own timeline and make us believe they last for hours; they make us “hear” things, and even make us believe we have a certain control over them. We wake up with strange paradoxal feelings about them.
The Concertino uses techniques of representation and approximation in an attempt to materialize in sounds the unstable state of mind of one trying to recall the details of a dream — a very short one (the first bar of the piece, lasting 3-4 seconds). This moment is analyzed with obsession, detail by detail, until it is almost forgotten and eventually reconstructed; the reversibility of this process leads to a certain enthusiasm towards the end of the piece, perhaps a description of the pleasure of “solving a problem”.
The piece has roughly three sections, the central one introducing a lot of silences in the rather talkative clusters of musical objects heard since the beginning of the composition. The last minutes of the Concertino cut the material into discrete parts in order to reconstruct the initial idea: a series of dives into and out of a liquid acoustic environment.
Commissioned by New Music Concerts with the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, Concertino is dedicated to NMC artistic director Robert Aitken and general manager David Olds.
— André Ristic