Event info

Thierry Escaich: Mecanic song for piano and wind quintet
Nino Rota: Nonetto

One of France's key contemporary composers, Thierry Escaich (1965) is a true renaissance man. Not only a prolific composer, Eiscaich is a sought-after teacher at the Paris Conservatory, a master improviser and one of today's most sought after concert organists internationally, also being the organist at the Saint-Étienn-du-Mont church in Paris. Escaich performed at the International Organ Summer Festival in Iceland’s Hallgrímskirkja 2018. He graduated from the Paris Conservatory in Paris in 1992, both in composition and organ playing. He obtained the first prize in eight different disciplines.

Eschaich composes in many styles and forms and his oeuvre consists of over 100 works that have impressed audiences around the world with poetic lines, rich melody and rhythmic energy.

He draws his inspiration from many places, e.g. to Brahms, Bartók, Ravel and Messiaen, but you can also hear influences from church music.

Mecanic song, a work for wind quintet and piano, was composed in 2006.

The Italian Nino Rota (1911-1979) was mainly known as a film composer, especially for music he composed with the directors Fellini, Visconti, Zeffirelli and Coppola, but Nino Rota won the Oscar for his music for Coppola's second film about the Godfather in 1974. On Rota's unusually long career left him music for over 150 films and a very large collection of works that includes 10 operas, 23 ballets and performing arts, three symphonies and many choral and chamber works.

Nonetto is written, revised and edited between 1959 and 1977, showing a variety of aspects of his work as a composer. The work is in five movements and it can be said that there is never a dead moment where cheerful themes and often unexpected sounds come into play. The work refers to some extent to the past with its form, but Rota tries his hand at various stylistic changes and the result is a work that pleases both the audience and the performers.

The Reykjavík Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1974 under the leadership of Rut Ingólfsdóttir. It initially comprised a dozen young musicians who had recently returned to Iceland to perform with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and teach at the Reykjavík College of Music after advanced music studies abroad. The ensemble was founded with the dual objective of offering the public regular performances of chamber music from the Baroque era to the twentieth century and of providing performing musicians with varied and challenging performance opportunities. It can be said without hesitation that Reykjavík Chamber Orchestra, now one of the cornerstones of Icelandic musical life, has succeeded in its mission.

The Reykjavík Chamber Orchestra appears in diverse groupings ranging from 3 to 35 players; its size and instrumentation vary according to the projects at hand. Its members remain active in the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and as teachers and free-lance performers, but they share the goal of enriching Icelandic musical life with performances of chamber music from various periods. Thus the Reykjavík Chamber Orchestra’s objectives remain as valid today as they were at the time of the ensemble’s founding four decades ago.