Singer

Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil, which roughly translates to Four Songs for Crossing the Threshold, explores the boundary between life and death – a significance that is elevated by Grisey’s passing soon after its completion, preventing his attendance at the world premiere of the piece by the London Sinfonietta and George Benjamin in 1999.

Grisey: Quatre Chants

Southbank Centre

A rare opportunity awaits to experience French composer Gérard Grisey's stunningly dark and disorienting Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil, presented by the London Sinfonietta. This masterpiece offers a journey through intricate collisions of fragmented melody and harmony.  

Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil, which roughly translates to Four Songs for Crossing the Threshold, explores the boundary between life and death – a significance that is elevated by Grisey's passing soon after its completion, preventing his attendance at the world premiere of the piece by the London Sinfonietta and George Benjamin in 1999. 

EPSG:4326

Prelude Concert

Tanglewood Music Center

London Sinfonietta travels to the future with three UK premieres and a favourite past commission. Sky Macklay’s Microvariations will lull you into a false sense of tonality before whisking you on a whistle-stop, microtonal tour of 19th Century European orchestras, “a fast-forward and transcontinental sonic truncation and fantasy on” the journey of British conductor George Thomas Smart and his tuning fork in 1825. In George Lewis’ lively Tales of the Traveller, the eponymous hero travels the limits of imagination: the piece allows a soloist total free reign to improvise against a notated ensemble part. After the interval, Katherine Balch’s “serenade to lost or wasted time” plays a soprano soloist against four hand-held cassette tape recorders to distort and fragment our memory of the piece even as it is played, while the programme is rounded off by Michel van der Aa’s latest commission for the ensemble, Shades of Red, which illustrates the different perceived properties of the colour red, alongside a soundtrack which confronts the players with their own warped and distorted soundworld.

New Traditions

Departure Duo (Nina Guo, soprano, and Eddie Kass, double bass) return for the second installment of their residency with the Composition, Contemporary Classical Music, and Core Studies Department, performing a vibrant concert of world premieres written for them by composition majors.

New Music Festival: Guest Artist—Departure Duo

Boston Conservatory at Berklee

Enter the world of soprano and double bass, for an evening of wide-ranging and colorful sounds. In an hour of music, you will hear a Totentanz (dance of death) in the Jamaican language, during which Death gleefully proclaims judgment upon those she calls to her irresistible dance; puritanical quips from an eighteenth-century eccentric who actually shipped coals to Newcastle; strings of Joycean insults; and the sparse, deliberate beauty of negative sonic space.

Soprano

Nina Guo

Events

Past events

Nov 28, 2025

Grisey: Quatre Chants · Southbank Centre

Nov 28, 2025

Grisey: Quatre Chants · London Sinfonietta

Future and recently performed repertoire

Singer in 4 Chants pour franchir le seuil by Grisey

Southbank Centre

Singer in for mira by Miller

London Sinfonietta

Singer in Stirrings Still II by Saunders

London Sinfonietta

About

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