Beautiful piece, Michael, and a beautiful hommage to Dutilleux.

sounds like some Spanish contemporary, nice and dissonant!

Klimtian way of introducing the main character voice!

The Juilliard Orchestra
Robert Fleitz - Piano
Jeffrey Milarsky - Conductor

This piece is written in the memory of the French composer Henri Dutilleux who would have celebrated his 100th birthday at the time this piece was completed in January 2016. 

I started writing this piece in Paris in May 2013 when Dutilleux died aged 96. Dutilleux helped to shape and form my sound, taste and sense of aesthetics and for me was a symbol of French music. In deep morning I sketched the first few pages of this piece.  

In my first sketch there was no piano, and it was titled “Ascend”. Not long after I stopped working on this piece, I was too overtaken with grief, and I left Paris.  

About three years later, as his 100th birthday was nearing I decided to return to this piece and to add a piano.  

The piano for me represented the individual, a protagonist dealing with deep sorrow. A lonely voice in a world filled with voices.  

The strings start off the piece in a procession. The string writing of the first few pages is borrowing heavily from the baroque lamento, with a repeated pattern of notes that creates dissonances and resolutions and an ever descending bass.  

The piano has three main elements through-out this piece: 
*A three note motive (A-Bb-Db) which was taken from Dutilleux’s piece “The Shadows of Time”, a piece based on Anne Frank’s diary. In his piece, those three notes are sang by a child with the words “Pourquoi Nous?” – “Why us?”. 

The second element presented by the piano is a series of very quick disjunct patterns. Those patterns are supposed to represent murmuring, or crying in an onomatopoeia. 

The third and final major element is represented by thick chords played by the pianist who depict the church bells.  

As this piece is written about my grief, I thought that the Kübler-Ross model (better known as “The five stages of grief”) would be a suitable platform to shape the arc of the piece. The piece starts in Denial, goes through anger, bargaining, depression and finally concludes with acceptance.  


Seltenreich - Élégie (2016) for piano and string orchestra

Native of Israel, Seltenreich has been performed by some of the world’s leading orchestras and ensembles, among them The Tokyo Philharmonic, The Israel Philharmonic, The Israeli Opera, and the Talea Ensemble. 
He has recently been commission by the Messiaen Festival in France, he has been offered a fellowship to the Aspen Music Festival (2016), and was invited to the soundSCAPE Music Festival in Italy (2016). Seltenreich was selected as an Associate Artist at Atlantic Center for the Arts’ residency with Georg Friedrich Haas (2016).  Seltenreich is the recipient of several domestic and international awards and is the youngest composer ever to be awarded the 1st prize in the Salvatore Martirano Composition Competition. Other distinctions include the Arthur Friedman prize for “an outstanding orchestral work” (2015) and the Frank Robert Abell Young Composer Competition for New Chamber Music (2015).
Seltenreich completed his Bachelor’s degree in music composition at Tel-Aviv University; and his Master’s degree at The Juilliard School in New York city under the direction of Matthias Pintscher.


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os sons de Löis Lancaster

os sons de Löis Lancaster

Sonoscapist

Sonoscapist

Pascual Araujo

Robert A. Baker