The Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) is delighted to present Harmonies du Soir, a three day chamber music festival celebrating the refined sounds of French music performed by ANAM’s outstanding musicians.
This chamber music festival, marking the close of the ANAM year, is a thoughtful nod to the intricate interplay of tradition and modernity. Expect whispers of elegant, fleeting melodies alongside daring, avant-garde gestures – a journey through the shifts in French musical identity.
The program navigates a spectrum of moods and textures, honouring both the old masters and contemporary voices who have left their mark on the genre, in ways both subtle and bold.
Over three days music lovers and Francophiles can plunge into the passion and artistry of France in concerts and music inspired by iconic works of literature, famous monuments, and historical flash points.
This concert moves through three symbolic landmarks of French culture and the historical turning points surrounding each one. We work backwards in time from the exposed experimentalism of the Centre Pompidou and Pierre Boulez’s grand vision of modernism spilling out of IRCAM, hearing the bold contemporary voices of Thierry Escaich and Clara Maïda. Slipping back in time to the splendour of the seventeenth-century Court of Versailles, we hear Jean-Baptiste Lully crafting what a French sound should be under the eye and tastes of Louis XIV. And finally to the eternal Notre-Dame, standing for nearly nine hundred years through fire and famine, wherein echoes the sacred and secular traditions of the French Baroque in works by Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Jean-Marie Leclair and François Couperin.
