The fusion of symphonic sound with electronics can produce a wide palette of colours, often intensified by the use of unconventional means that contemporary music composers employ with gusto. During the concert featuring the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic conducted by Vincent Kozlovski and artists closely associated with the electronic music scene – Daniele Ghisi, Pierre Carré and Luca Bagnoli – an engaging work combining these two aspects will be presented.

A Walk into the Future for orchestra and sampler comes from an album by Norwegian artist Øyvind Torvund. The composition begins with the whistling of a carefree melody, supported by a stately snare drum part, then broken by electronic murmurs, glissandi gradually thickening amidst the aleatoric hubbub. Critic Jennifer Gersten sees a personal thread in the work’s turbulent tones: Torvund completed it shortly before his father’s death, who was the esteemed sculptor Gunnar Torvund. Daniele Ghisi, on the basis of the composition Any Road for orchestra, electronics and video, juxtaposes images and sound visions, embedding the visual and sonic layers in the context of a journey into the unknown. “Someone looking out of a train window, a never-ending fall, a transition from outline to image, from animation to film. In a sense, it’s a game. And isn’t a game (and especially a video game) an exploration of space and time without knowing exactly where you’re going? If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there,” says Ghisi, who worked on the project with Boris Labbé, the author of the video. 

Gaming themes form the background for Nicole Lizée, who in her composition Arcadiac, created over almost a decade, synthesizes the sound of an instrumental ensemble with slot machines from the seventies and eighties. The artist confronts glitchy tones, explosions and crackles from one of the old-school arcade games with the acoustic potential inherent in the coherent, living organism, which is a symphony orchestra. Franck Bedrossian manipulates the same performing apparatus, distorting the traditional timbre of the instruments and using electronics. His composition Twist intertwines musical textures that are polarised towards each other, because Bedrossian places, as he emphasises, “alien instruments” in the symphonic sphere, creating exciting ambiguities.

Selim Jeon – a young-generation Korean composer – in Chant radioactif for trombone with electronics and orchestra reveals inspiration by the Cherenkov effect, which is the generation of a characteristic blue glow when a particle carrying an electric charge passes through a transparent medium, such as water or air. Jeon illustrates the sound of particles gradually dispersing and generating chaotic polyphony. Metaphorically, she refers to the complex processes that stand behind this sublime, beautiful in its own way, natural phenomenon. Sound diffusion is also the thematic source of the piece A light stung the darkness for piano, fishing lines, tonitruon and electronics by Engin Dağlık. The Turkish composer builds a landscape inspired by Gaspard de la nuit – a collection of poems by the French poet Aloysius Bertrand. Dağlık, treating with care the extensive dimension of the sound, positions individual sounds, exploring the relationship between spatiality and acoustics and the resulting transformations.