French composer Philippe Manoury will be the main focus of this year’s Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik. The festival also presents new chamber music works by Liza Lim and Marco Stroppa.


Philippe Manoury
Philippe Manoury will be particularly honored during this 46th occasion of the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik. Arditti quartet, who is celebrating his 40th birthday this year, will perform his 3rd string quartet, Melencolia. Ensemble Recherche will perform Petit Aleph for flute, and Gestes for string quartet. 

Philippe Manoury will also present two world premieres: Trauermärsche, a short piece for chamber orchestra, that will be performed by WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln and Le temps, mode d´emploi, a piece for two pianos and electronics, that will be performed by GrauSchumacher Piano Duo, with whom Philippe is pursuing the good collaboration he had begun with his orchestral piece Zones de turbulences.

In this interview, Philippe Manoury explains which were the writing stakes of these two new pieces, closely linked to his current concerns, notably regarding the concept of temporality. 





Liza Lim
The Weaver’s Knot is written for the 40th anniversary of the Arditti Quartet. It is a string quartet based on aspects of hardanger fiddle playing. Here is what Liza Lim says about it:

“The ‘weaver’s knot’ (also known as a ‘sheet bend’ in knot parlance) is a traditional technique used for hundreds of years in textile production that is an incredibly strong and effective method of tying threads together. It’s a knot that uses tension to hold it in place yet is also reversible so it can be undone. The musical work offers an image of the string quartet as an ensemble of dynamic sonic threads in an unfolding process of binding and unbinding. Individual lines follow different pathways coming together to create emergent patterns or knots in which tension is accumulated and held or released.”


Marco Stroppa
La Vita Immobile, 7 musical micro-automatons for string quartet, is the piece that Marco Stroppa has devoted to the Arditti quartet for the celebration of 40th birthday of their activity. The world premiere will take place on May 10, in Witten.

As the composer explains, the work is made up by 7 little musical “machines”, each based on a single type of sonoric material and formal process, like the 7 letters of the name Arditti: 4 consonants (3 percussive and an “r”), 3 vowels. 4 rapid and vigorous, 3 slower and more contemplative. The name of the quartet becomes the backbone – imperceptible yet indispensible – of the piece. 

While composing the work, I received news of the untimely death of Gerard Mortier, an immense, passionate defender of the music of our time. Thus, the final micro-movement has been written “in memoriam”.

The title comes from a series of 23 short stories by Marco Mazzolini, imaginative writings animated by an inexorable formal construction and structured in a cyclical manner.