Cast
Le Balcon — Orchestra
Maxime Pascal — Conductor
Program notes
At the sixth edition of the Festival Singer-Polignac, join Maxime Pascal as he conducts Le Balcon in a spellbinding and thought-provoking performance of Jonathan Harvey’s Bhakti from the beautiful, historic concert hall of the Fondation Singer-Polignac. Bhakti, meaning “devotion” or “love of God,” is a spiritual work comprising twelve movements, each punctuated by a quotation from the hymns of the Rig Veda, a collection of sacred, four-thousand-year-old Sanskrit hymns believed by Harvey to be “the keys to a transcendent consciousness.” Written in 1982 and now an emblematic work of the mixed music repertoire, Harvey’s innovative piece is written for an ensemble of fifteen instrumentalists and a quadraphonic tape of digitally mixed orchestral sounds. “After about ten minutes,” Le Balcon promises us, “the origin, source, or nature of the sound no longer matters: you already feel your spirit lifting off the edge.”
Photo © Meng Phu