On 22 January in Munich, as part of the Musica Viva season, the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, conducted by Susanna Mällki, will perform the (live) world premiere of The Narrow Corner. This piece, commissioned by Radio France for its radio programme Alla breve in 2013, was previously recorded by the Orchestre Philharmonique with Mällki on the podium, and broadcast in February 2015.

We have asked the composer to talk about The Narrow Corner and its poetics.

The Radio asked me for a piece divided into five radiophonic “episodes” each one with two minutes of music. And I wanted to find a way to approach these two-minute segments in a way that turned out to be unitary, albeit with the temporal interruptions. The result was five moments that are like five paradoxical perspectives on a single sonic world. The narration that results is elliptical and the elements are contextualised, decontextualised and recontextualised according to the glimpse that the particular point of view that each occasion offers of them. This is the sense of five brief moments, which are not movements but are “in movement”. Five times the image of the whole of which the point of view – “the narrow corner” in fact – prevents a single interpretation can be completed differently. With the result that the overall form is not linear but “in depth”, a sort of permanence of a place through various temporal perspectives.