One of the assets of Wratislavia Cantans is the huge variety of the repertoire presented. In addition to early music, you can also hear works by composers considered classics of the last century and pieces by living composers who set new trends. Tonight, the first part of the concert will take place in the Red Hall, and the second in the ORLEN Main Hall. First the sextet Les Percussions de Strasbourg, active since 1962, will perform, and later Ensemble intercontemporain, founded in 1976 by the legendary conductor and composer Pierre Boulez.

The programme features works by Agata Zubel and Gérard Grisey. The Polish composer, singer and teacher Agata Zubel is one of the most interesting and important figures on the international music scene. She was born in Wrocław, studied there and currently teaches at her alma mater. She collaborates with the most prestigious concert halls in the world, including Carnegie Hall in New York, the Berlin Philharmonic, and Musikverein Wien. Spray is a work commissioned by Les Percussions de Strasbourg in 2023. Its premiere took place in Strasbourg on 22 February 2024. This piece combines elements of performance, music, and visual arts. The instruments are spray cans, as well as spatulas, brushes, cardboard, and sandpaper. Each of the performers uses them to make paintings on six blank canvases. The bodies and movements of the artists are no less important in the work. The audience gathered in the Red Hall will therefore witness the creation of paintings. “Music is, among other things, the becoming of sounds, and this matter has concerned me since I became a composer. Where does sound come from? Where does it go? What is its path among many paths? How does it meander? What direction does it take here or there? [...] The understanding and measure of difference at any given moment becomes the real material of a musical composition. What happens between sound A and sound B? What is most important. […] It is this monster that, thanks to patience, intuition and naivety (while being a little afraid of it), musicians tame” is how the French composer Gérard Grisey, one of the initiators of the spectral music movement, summed up his approach to creative work. Quatre Chants pour franchir le seuil (the title literally means “Four Songs Crossing the Threshold”), themed around the inevitability of death, turned out to be the artist’s last completed work. The composer used a contemporary text by the French poet Christian Gabriel Guez Ricord, ancient texts from Egypt (the words about the path of light appear there), Greece, and Mesopotamia. The themes of the individual movements mean the death of an angel, death of a civilization, death of a voice and death of humanity. In this moving piece, full of emotional depth, Agata Zubel will appear on stage as a soloist.