How are the most ambitious projects born? Sometimes from a brief, spontaneous exchange: “Ligeti? I love it! – I love it too!” From this shared enthusiasm, Émile Parisien and Roberto Negro have come up with Métanuits, a wild jazz adaptation of György Ligeti’s Métamorphoses nocturnes. Claiming an approach “as generous and lightning-fast as it is full of reverence for the great Hungarian master”, they have reduced, transposed and rewritten his first – and famous – string quartet for saxophone and piano. It’s a way for the two musicians to offer an original re-reading that “walks within, alongside, beyond and between the lines of the original”. The result is a jubilant live performance.
Proof if it were needed that the string quartet repertoire still inspires, this re-performance of the first quartet written by the young Ligeti under the influence of Béla Bartók, gives a furious envy… particularly when the saxophonist is someone as unpredictable as Émile Parisien and the pianist a poet like Roberto Negro.
Program :
Les Métanuits (Jazz) (based on Giorgy Ligeti’s Métamorphoses nocturnes)
