The International Festival Chorus with “Les Percussions Claviers de Lyon” present

Conductor: Nicholas Smith

 

Over the last five years, the International Festival Chorus (IFC) has presented quite a few heavy works. And after five years of hard work, perhaps it is time for a change of pace, and an evening of champagne and laughter. The IFC is teaming up with Les Percussions Claviers de Lyon (PCL), the world’s most spectacular percussion ensemble, to present an evening of fun music on April 14 at the Forbidden City Concert Hall in a program that will invigorate lovers of all kinds of music, and bring East and West together in a sensual musical feast.

The second half of the concert is where the champagne corks start to fly and the party really gets hot. IFC will team up with PCL and local pianist Shen Yue in three movements from Off, Off, Offenbach, a work created by Gérard Lecointe from everyone’s favourite bits of Offenbach. In this work, Lecointe cuts out all the boring bits of Offenbach’s best operas and gets straight to the good tunes, setting them in clever musical contexts. Opera aficionados will laugh at the musical jokes, and those who are hearing the tunes for the first time will love the presentation!

 

Point Bak

Gérard Lecointe

25’

Based on themes from the well tempered clavier of JS Bach

I composed Point Bak in 1997 at the request of a French festival dedicated to the music of JS Bach. My goal was not to arrange some pages of this musical genius’s work, but to compose a piece intended for all types of audience. Thus I decided to compose a musical entertainment working around the first book of the Well Tempered Clavier, which, as everyone knows, starts with the universally known C major prelude.

Then preludes and fugues that follow originate from what I extracted from a few themes while keeping the original tonalities. Each time I only use a few bars as the compositional material, and treat this in alternately a rhythmic or melodic manner.

The first movement is built on a rhythmic ostinato, with some notes from the first fugue constantly repeated. The music moves from the prelude and Fugue 2, making use of the power of sound, creating a musical hallucination.

The second movement builds a new melody out of some notes from the third prelude, and concludes by juxtaposing the sublimes harmonies of Prelude 8 and quotations from the music of Maurice Ravel, reflecting intimacy and the beauty of the instruments.

After a short introduction using the seventeenth prelude, the third movement ventures through bitonal modes, mixing quasi-simultaneously elements from Prelude 9 and the Fugue 10. This section concludes using a new theme with rhythmic cells derived from the sixth prelude, and creating a shimmering and fluttering of sonorities.

The last movement starts in the style of Prokofiev, diverting several short thematic elements, and is followed by a musical mischief startup around four bars indefinitively repeated from Preludes 10 and 16; this fourth movement resumes the obstinacy of the first, thus forming a musical arch, and is characterized by fast music and the pleasure of sound.

As a conclusion, Prelude 1 is used as an epilogue, reinforcing the idea that the music from the man who has most influenced occidental music remains universal, and will always resist all temptations and all modes.

Gerard Lecointe