lovemusic: Heart of Light

Strasbourg based collective lovemusic return to City, with a programme of music for ensemble, electronics and light, specially created in response to the darkness of the Winter months.

Please note, this event is free to attend, but seats are limited, so please do sign up to attend, via the 'register now' button above.

Programme:

• Finbar Hosie, The Hyacinth Garden* , for clarinet, viola, electric guitar and performer and electronics (2023)
• Santiago Díez-Fischer, love fragments*, for flute, clarinet, viola, cello, electric guitar and electronics (2022)
• Mic Spencer, nuthinlik disperr* (Love Letter No.5) in Memoriam Hans-Joachim Hespos, for quintet (2023)
• Noriko Baba, Bonbori, for quintet with objects (2008)
• Sasha Blondeau, Sortir du noir, for cello and electronics (2016)

* commissioned by lovemusic

Heart of Light was imagined for the month of February, the last month of winter, a distinctive colour lingering on the horizon giving us the impression something new is coming. Light has a central place in the ideas behind all the music.

Finbar Hosie’s new work The Hyacinth Garden invites us on a political and sensuous exploration through waste lands and gardens, in search of togetherness and separation in space and sound. Noriko Baba’s Bonbori is a sound painting of the beauty of Japanese lacquerware glimmering in candlelight in a dark room. Mic Spencer’s new piece, nuthin lik disperr, part of his love letters cycle, is inspired by the poem of the same name by Tom Leonard, an ode to the joy of metaphorical darkness. Santiago Díez Fischer’s love fragments takes Sappho’s fragments on love and desire as the starting point, beginning with the line, “You Burn me” and is part of a new album to be released in the Spring of 2023 documenting his work with lovemusic. Finally in Sasha Blondeau’s Sortir du noir (title "stolen" from Georges Didi-Huberman’s book of the same name) two types of light collide - strong and intentional (roaming searchlights) with fleeting and inadvertent (lamps of lost people).

lovemusic

• Emiliano Gavito - Flute
• Adam Starkie - Clarinet
• Sophie Wahlmüller - Viola
• Lola Malique - Cello
• Christian Lozano - Guitar
• Finbar Hosie - Electronics and Lights

About lovemusic 

lovemusic is a collective of musicians based in Strasbourg. They have established themselves in France as one of the most exciting groups of new music’s next generation, working with the festival Musica, The Opéra National du Rhin, The Arsenal (Metz), and The Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, as well as performances in some of Europes leading festivals including Festival d’Automne à Paris, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Klangwerkstatt Berlin, Festival DME (Lisbon).

Their performances explore light, video, scenography, in collaboration on new works with composers including Santiago Diez Fischer, Michelle Agnes Magalhaes, David Bird, Erin Gee, Jesse Broekman, Michele Abondano, Finbar Hosie, Annette Schlünz, Jérôme Combier, Malin Bång, Philip Venables, Kelley Sheehan, Raphael Languillat, Maria Laura Dissandro.