In partnership with Orchestre de Chambre de Paris, Théâtre du Châtelet is running a new series of concerts this season comprising a morning session reserved for schoolchildren and a lunchtime session for all ages. The format for both sessions is the same: a contemporary work or a ten-minute devised piece, followed by a discussion with the composer or a musician. Then, building on the insights gleaned from the discussion, the work is performed a second time and interacts with a major work of classical music.
As Fazil Say explains: “Basically, I’ve been composing since the age of five or six. During part of my childhood, the act of ‘composing’ was more akin to a fruitful exercise in improvisation. I had to learn to write. And, after some years of patience, I was able, thanks to my teachers, to put my ideas on paper”. A gifted child who became a prodigious pianist, and now both internationally celebrated as well as considered a composer defying easy categorisation. Written in 2007, two years before Istanbul Symphony, these Symphonic Dances bring together the rhythms and timbres of his native Turkey with Western traditions. A composition in the image of the composer: cosmopolitan, open, free and roaming: “It is in my nature as well as my personal desire to unite people through music, to abolish all borders, even those of the mind.”