2022

"If I could ground myself"

“If I could ground myself” (Si je pouvais m’ancrer) is the reed quintet’s very first concert, which took place on Friday, November 25, 2022 at Montreal’s Sala Rossa. Presented in co-presentation with Innovations en concert, this evening gave the audience the chance to hear works that pull us to the right, to the left, that leave us in suspense and that propel us at full speed.

Saxophonist Thomas Gauthier-Lang, artistic director of this first concert, has built a program around the same theme: our relationship to time. The program includes three Quebec premieres as well as two creations by composers Simon Bourget and Romain Camiolo.

  • CAMIOLO, Romain (France) /// À la dérive dans le noosphère (2022)*
  • ÖZTEKIN, Uğurcan (Turquie) /// Conference of the birds (2019)†
  • VERDUIN, Janco (Pays-Bas) /// Wall paint, paper, and cardboard on panel (2016)†
  • BOURGET, Simon (Canada) /// Les danses galactiques (2022)*
  • BIEDENBENDER, David (États-Unis) /// Refraction (2012)†

*Creation
†Quebec premiere

Performance date(s)

The composers

Romain Camiolo compositeur 5ilience

© Matt Ayotte

Romain Camiolo

The 5ilience Quintet project is first and foremost an opportunity for me to experiment with associations, confrontations and weaving of timbres in an original instrumental formation. The performers who make up the Quintet, through their listening skills and their propensity for exploration, have allowed me to nourish my reflection and my approach to these timbres, in order to compose a piece that I see as a postcard sent by a boat floating in limbo.

We also agree in our desire to renew the form of the concert through interdisciplinarity. Linking the music to an abstract visual universe, full of materials and affects, is for me the way to stretch a thread between contemporary music and the public, by investing it in an immersive universe.

Simon Bourget compositeur 5ilience

© Jean-Sebastien Senécal

Simon Bourget

As a professional musician, I spontaneously aspire to develop an instrumental writing style that is as idiomatic as it is efficient. It is important to me that each part can be played with a natural ease. By having the possibility of exploiting the woodwind section of the orchestra, even if the saxophone replaces the horn, each one has its own distinct sonic personality. And as they are very heterogeneous sounds, it allows me to explore more textures. From bassoon to E-flat clarinet, the range is very wide. In addition to their standard quintet instruments, each instrumentalist can exploit their own respective instrument family. For example, the saxophone can play the soprano or tenor saxophone and the oboe, the English horn.

The polytonality, the assumed dissonances, the syncopated and jerky rhythms; so many writing techniques that I particularly like and which give me access to an aestheticism that I like to qualify as Machiavellian.