Cantates

These final and majestic works, very rarely performed because of the number of musicians required, are the epitome of Webern's art, combining canon techniques and symmetries, dodecaphonic and antiphonal writing, references to 16th-century polyphony, fugue and lied, with the fabulous inventiveness of timbres and perspectives. The second Cantata is comparable to a Missa Brevis, leading to a form of "assumption". And when Webern orchestrates the six-part Ricercar of Bach's Musical Offering, the ghostly presence of the past is even more explicit. It is also a mirror construction that Philippe Manoury adopts in his Passacaglia for Tokyo. "A mise en abîme that echoes in multiple images an initial drawing" according to the composer. Echoing explicitly his great elder of the Second Viennese School, Johannes Maria Staud returns to Paris with his new creation meeting the modernist poetry of the American William Carlos Williams.