Sylvaine Hélary & Vassilena Serafimova

Sylvaine Hélary : 

Shore Skipping echoes this flow of new music while borrowing the codes and playgrounds of jazz. The instrumentation of Shore Skipping is quite rare. Four flutes, a saxophone or a clarinet, a piano, a double bass, plus an analog synthesizer and a ring modulator that allow for live piano treatments at certain moments. The score takes us between the most stripped down minimalism and orchestral effervescence.

Building together sounds never heard before is what drives the four musicians of this group. Shore Skipping's repertoire is undeniably linked to New Music and its way of sharing improvisations and written compositions.

The piece, written in a tight stretto, reveals, with strictly acoustic means, a sound unimaginable before the invention of the electronic delay, but which does not quite resemble it, producing a most disturbing impact on our senses.

The percussionist Vassilena Serafimova presents a program that balances learned and electroacoustic music, music of yesterday and today, transcriptions and creations, instrumental music and musical theater.

2022 celebrates the 100th anniversary of the birth of a giant of contemporary music - Iannis Xenakis. Among the first composers of the 20th century to take an interest in percussion, he composed several masterpieces for these instruments - both solo and in chamber music.

In this program, Vassilena will pay tribute to him by performing his famous diptych Rebonds.

Also, the French premiere of Really Bad Now, by American composer John Psathas. Several percussionists from around the world (including Vassilena) have commissioned this composer to write a work for percussion and electronics in several movements.

Two pieces in the program turn to the work of J. S. Bach. The famous Chaconne from the second Partita for solo violin (BWV 1004) transcribed by Vassilena on the marimba and Miroirs, a rereading of the Sonata No. 4 for organ by Johann Sebastian Bach, revisited by the sound of the marimba but also recomposed by Vassilena who gives this masterpiece a new sound identity and more particularly rhythmic, the irregular metre inspired by Slavic popular practices.