Album release by Music Information Centre Lithuania in 2024
Music Information Centre Lithuania is releasing Justina Repečkaitė's first album in 2024. Compositions that will appear in the album are reflective of the professional journey of the composer. Composed between 2012 and 2021 they encompass recordings made in the Baltic States, France and Germany. The album will be released in both physical and digital versions.
Since its creation in 2012, “Chartres” for string orchestra, was recommended work by the International Rostrum of Composers and selected for the World Music Days festival. “Chartres” has already been performed by 9 orchestras worldwide. The chosen performance for the album is the stunning rendition by Sinfonietta Riga under the baton of Normunds Šnē during the Baltic Music Days festival in 2023.
“Cosmatesque” (2017) is the first orchestral piece by Justina Repečkaitė commissioned by the festival Gaida, the biggest contemporary music festival in the Baltic states.
Commissioned by the Royaumont Foundation in 2019, “La Cité des Dames” (text by Christine de Pizan, 1405) for 6 sopranos, was premiered by 6 singers under the guidance of Donatienne Michel-Dansac. For the album, one of the singers who premiered the composition, Kanae Mizobuchi, will record all the parts herself, proposing a new homogeneous sound.
The album contains only one vocal composition, but the voice is also featured in another piece titled “Datura” (2021). This is a solo miniature commissioned by ARS NOVA ensemble for their project Mosaïque in which the trombone player, Mathilde Comoy, extensively incorporates her voice using text from “Flora Parisiensis” (Pierre Bulliard, 1777).
The album includes 3 compositions for solo instruments and electronics. “Incantare” (2018), for flute and tape, inspired by Lithuanian healing charms, will be recorded in the new version for a bass flute and male performer.
Two compositions employ transducers attached to the instruments themselves:
“Transduced” (2020), a Cursus Ircam composition, which binaural recording was made in the big hall of the Centre Pompidou and “Sturnus vulgaris cohibitus” (2020) for piano and tape that captures the feel of confinement.
“Sturnus vulgaris cohibitus” will be premiered the piece in Vilnius in 2020 during the lockdown. recording the composition “Tapisserie” (2015) for ensemble will be recorded by Ensemble for New Music Tallinn conducted by Arash Yazdani. ENMT played Justina’s music in Baltic music days in 2021-2022, Ars Musica (BE) and in MusicOlomouc (CH). Similarly to ‘Chartres’, ‘Tapisserie‘ was selected for both International Rostrum of Composers and World Music Days, is already performed by 15 ensembles worldwide.
Another ensemble piece from Justina's artisanat series, which alludes to a craft, is 'Weaving' (2020). It was performed during the festival Nouveaux Horizons in extraordinary times when a curfew had just been imposed in France.
Justina’s interest in medieval culture (“Chartres”, “La Cité des Dames”), crafts (“Tapisserie”, “Weaving”, “Cosmatesque”), charms (“Incantare”, “Datura”) and the physical models of instruments (“Transduced”, “Sturnus vulgaris cohibitus”) fully represent the composer’s body of work.
“Her works are woven with cold and white polyphonies. Like Tapisserie (2015), which presents itself as a complex web of lines stretched to the extreme, as if stretched towards an impossible resolution, but whose relationships and discrepancies – a heritage of medieval music? – are governed by internal mathematics. And with only one transverse flute (Incantare, 2018), she builds a world crowded with terrifying monsters. Do not be fooled by appearances: in this smart thirty-something, with a wise and discreet demeanour, anguish lurks at every corner of the note.”
The release of the album by Music Information Centre Lithuania is sponsored by:
