Altazor
Commissioned by Festival D’Autumne a Paris and is dedicated to Josephine Markovits.
Premiered on18th November 2011, in the Amphithéâtre de l’Opéra-Bastille in Paris at the Festival D’Autumne, by Guillermo Anzorena and L’instant donné conducted by James Weeks. Electronics created at IRCAM Studios by Lorenzo Bianchi.
Altazor is based on the poem of the poet Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948).First published in 1931, the poem describes a fall in a parachute and is divided into seven cantos, from which a selection of fragments were set to music and create a monodrama. The language disintegrates into sounds as the poem describes the end of consciousness. If the semantics of the poem can affect the musical direction, in Paredes’ hand the musical semantics take over to define the internal structure and shape the work.
The piece explores a wide variety of treatments of the voice as well as instrumental, and extend them with live electronic means and spacialization with which the composer pursues her phonetic exploration of the language.