In a month when among the artists taking to the stage of the Grande Auditorium are the baritone Thomas Hampson, the pianists Evgeny Kissin and Katia and Marielle Labèque, the maestro Lorenzo Viotti , besides orchestras such as the Royal Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, Gulbenkian Music is also presenting a unique concert of contemporary music featuring the performance of three works: one a world premiere and the other two making their national premieres.

The first work on the program, Off-balance, is a world premiere and results from a commission by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to Luís Antunes Pena (b. 1973), a Portuguese composer living in Germany for over a decade.

Composed for two percussionists and an orchestra, this work takes its inspiration on the famous declaration uttered by George W. Bush, in March 2003, in which he accuses Iraq of possessing weapons of mass destruction. “This text has a direct influence on the composition of this work” the composer explained. “For example, in the first section, the percussion takes on the traditional instrumentation with a vibraphone on one side and tympanums on the other, passing through a section in which the percussion instruments are used as resonant bodies, simultaneously serving as amplifiers and filters for the sounds and the words of the text by G. W. Bush”.

The piece also evokes the “childhood imaginary and computer games through the small robots and toy machines” that are, in sum, “the modern drones which today make war”.

As regards the title – Off-balance –, the composer says this relates to a word used in dance to designate the point when the body becomes unbalanced and about to lose control over itself. “At the beginning of the work, I sought to express this change based on a simple rhythm that transforms in a very subtle way, almost non-perceptible, before the perception emerges of something completely different”. However, he advanced, if “the first minutes are composed according to this principle, later, the title takes on a political dimension and Off-Balance becomes one type of the imbalances that democracy is subject to”.

Music as a treasure

The second premiere of the night is the first chance to hear in Portugal the work Museum of Useless Things, by the Brazilian composer Celso Loureiro Chaves (b. 1950), which provides continuity to a partnership launched in 2015 between the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Symphonic Orchestra of the State of São Paulo (SP-LX). This partnership plans for the commissioning of works by Portuguese and Brazilian composers, with their premieres alternating between the two cities.

Described by the composer as “meditative”, this work comprises five movements “that may be understood as autonomous pieces” but that “are mutually interconnected to each other by the clarinet solos that serve as the entranceways to rooms in a museum”.

The composer highlights the fact that the work is built out of “dialogues that the violin soloist establishes with the different instrumental groups as if paying them a visit. “It is always the violin that invites the groups in the orchestra to issue sound and meditate. These meditations, in turn, pay homage to four cities: Lisbon and three Latin American cities, Porto Alegre, Manaus and Montevideo.”

The title of the work takes its inspiration from the essay The usefulness of the useless, by Nuccio Ordine, in which the Italian philosopher develops the concept of the utility of things and learnings freed from any idea of profit, defending that “a museum is a treasure that the collective should preserve most carefully and at any cost”. In this line, Celso Loureiro Chaves assumes the intention of, through his work, “creating a space for reflection in which music appears as one of the treasures of our collectives”.

Under the auspices of this partnership between the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Symphonic Orchestra of the State of São Paulo, premieres have already been given to works by Aylton Escobar (Rua do Douradores) and Luís Tinoco (The Blue Accent of the Waters). In this season, in addition to the piece Museum of Useless Things, there is also the absolute premiere of the Concert for piano by Vasco Mendonça (15 June).

A musical ocean

The concert comes to a close with the national premiere of the work Become Ocean, by the North American John Luther Adams (b. 1953), which won the composer the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2014 and that the New Yorker magazine described as “the most beautiful apocalypse in the History of Music”. With but a single movement, the work drew its title from a sentence by the composer John Cage that Adams thus explains: “Life on earth emerged from the sea. To the extent that the polar icecaps melt and the sea level rises, we humans face a perspective of becoming literally ocean.”

This “triple concert” of premieres is performed by the Gulbenkian Orchestra conducted by the maestro Pedro Neves and draws upon the collaboration of the Brazilian violinist Luíz Filíp, member of the Philharmonic Orchestra of Berlin, and the percussionists Rui Sul Gomes and Nuno Aroso.

On 23 February, at 8pm, one hour before the concert, in the congress zone, Sérgio Azevedo will be speaking about the works of John Luther Adams and Luís Antunes Pena in a session open to all those interested.