UPCOMING CONCERTS
23/11/2024 - Oslo (Norway): 1st String quartet op. 13 - Read
11/12/2024 - Paris: Prélude et Solitude, extracts from Trois Pièces op. 38 - Read
29/01/2025 - Montreal (Canada): 5 Préludes op. 22 - Read
New publication to be seen on the website page videos: the Méditation sur deux thèmes de La Journée de l’Existence op. 7, with Katharina Gohl Moser, cello and Anton Kernjak, piano, produced by La Pataconera in february 2024 in Basle.
The American Festival of Microtonal Music in New-York made a compilation of several Ivan Wyschnegradsky’s works they had published in CDs during the last 30 years: https://johnnyreinhard.bandcamp.com/album/ivan-wyschnegradsky-pierce-jonas-tom-chiu-johnny-reinhard-dan-auerbach-soldier-string-quartet-american-festival-of-microtonal-music
If you are able to communicate the details of a concert, research or an event concerning Ivan Wyschnegradsky, we would be grateful for your informing us.
EDITO
NB Previous editos are available by clicking here.
Alain Moëne – photo Tomoko
It is with infinite sadness that we must remember our friend the composer Alain Moëne, who left us on August 20th.
Alain Moëne was a member of the Board of Directors of the Ivan Wyschnegradsky Association for several years and was always close and loyal to us.
He held several important positions within Radio-France: Music Director of the Orchestre National de France in 1976, then Head of the Chamber Music Department, Director of France Musique, Delegate for Lyrical and Choral Activities, and finally Artistic Director of the Présences Festival and the Creation Department.
At our request, he composed a work for 2 pianos tuned a quarter tone apart, “De l’Ange”, which Dominique Ciot and I premiered in February 2016 at the Landowski Auditorium of the Conservatoire in Paris and which appears on the CD “Pianos quart de ton” published by the Shiiin label alongside works by Alain Bancquart and Ivan Wyschnegradsky. He then kindly agreed to write especially for Ivan Wyschnegradsky’s 3-manual quarter-tone piano “J’ai vu l’Arbre”, which I had the great joy of premiering in Basel in June 2019 as part of the Festival L’Esprit de l’Utopie.
From the beginning, he integrated microtonal writing into his language. He leaves around forty works for very varied formations, ranging from a piece for piccolo, for clavichord and Carrillo piano in 1/16th tone, a string quartet, a violin-cello duo… to works for large orchestra, with brass and voices. Among them, a very special piece brings together a baroque ensemble and an orchestra of traditional Japanese instruments.
His music, so personal, is intensely poetic.
His presence within our Association all these last years, his loyalty in friendship as well as his great uprightness, have been infinitely precious to us and will remain forever irreplaceable.
On Sunday, September 15 from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. on France-Musique, Arnaud Merlin will dedicate his program "Concert d'archives" to him. We hope that you will be able to listen and thus salute his memory.
Martine Joste – septembre 2024
IVAN WYSCHNEGRADSKY
‘I could have been a poet, a philosopher or a musician. I chose music: I am therefore a composer.’
Ivan Wyschnegradsky, born in Saint Petersburg in 1893, lived in Paris from 1920 until his death in 1979. Admired by numerous composers, amongst whom we can mention Olivier Messiaen, Henri Dutilleux, Bruce Mather, Alain Bancquart and Claude Ballif, Ivan Wyschnegradsky is recognized by the musical world as one of the pioneers in 20th century music.
Ivan Wyschnegradsky’s 1/4 tone piano, which in 1927 he had ordered from the August Förster manufacture, first was in the home of Claude Ballif, to whom he had bequeathed it. Since 2009 it belongs to the Paul-Sacher Foundation in Basel. Photo René Block (1979).