Oscar Strasnoy
*12 November 1970
Works by Oscar Strasnoy
Biography
Born November 12, 1970 in Buenos Aires is a French-Argentine composer, conductor and pianist. He studied composition, conducting and piano with (a.o.) Gérard Grisey at the Conservatoire de Paris and Hans Zender at the Hochschule für Musik Frankfurt am Main. He wrote a dozen stage works, from pocket-operas to full orchestra operas, also orchestral works, concerti, chamber music, two secular cantatas and several song cycles. His works are regularly played in theaters and festivals such as Berlin Staatsoper, Hamburg Staatsoper, Oper Zürich, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Paris Opéra Comique, Bordeaux Opera, Berliner Philharmonie, Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Mozarteum Salzburg, Buenos Aires Teatro Colón, Rome Opera, Spoleto Opera. In 2012, he was the portrayed composer of the Radio France Festival Présences, a retrospective of his works in fourteen concerts at the Théâtre du Châtelet.
Luciano Berio awarded him the 2000 Orpheus Prize for his chamber opera Midea produced at the Teatro Caio Melisso in Spoleto in 2000 and at the Rome Opera in 2001. In 2007 he received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for Music Composition. He is the recipient of several prices like the Prix de la Musique Symphonique de la SACEM or the Prix George Enesco. He was a composer in residence at the Schloß Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany (invited by Hans Zender), at Herrenhaus-Edenkoben (invited by Peter Eötvös) and at the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto, Japan.
He conducted the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Orch. National d'Ile-de-France, the Bordeaux Opera, Ensemble Resonanz of Hamburg, Akademie für Alte Music Berlin and other ensembles. He was the Music Director of the Orchestre du Crous de Paris (1996–1998).
About the music
Regardless of where the ideas of his own “invention” (literally, as with Bach) are taken from, Strasnoy does not allow himself to be dominated by his sources or his memory. On the contrary, he remodels his material into a thoroughly original discourse. The literal citations take on the role of road-signs: I leave from here, but to go elsewhere. It is always the elsewhere, not the point of departure, that interests Strasnoy, which distinguishes his music from all the "neo-something-or-others” that abound today. Here, the freedom afforded by counterpoint is evident, the freedom to create a discourse, an apparently spontaneous and free flow of music, which is revealed, after the fact, as the only possible outcome of the impulse that gave rise to it. Once the music has run its course, memory, going back in time, revives it as necessity.
The work of Strasnoy is like a tree trunk or a mountain that, from the outside, appear to be compact, uniform objects. On examination, we notice that in fact one is made up of a series of concentric rings and the other of strata. Similarly, analysis reveals the linguistic stratification of Strasnoy’s musical discourse, in which the citations are indicators. Their intermittent emergence seems to open an abyss in time. The musical past, apparently reduced to a semi-fossil state, still lends itself to the formation of new objects. Like the funeral chapels of the Capuchins, in Rome and Palermo, made from the bones of the dead. Time is constantly reconstructing, on the refuse, what is destined to decay.
Koheleth can tell us that all is vanity. That rain falls on the just as well as on the wicked. That the sun always rises after it has set, but that mankind knows no return. So why not laugh and make light of it? Irony alone saves us from despair. But you should know that this game that is repeated endlessly, conceals the most truthful and most tragic essence of existence. The game will not stop even with the final implosion of the solar system, which will collapse into a miniscule black hole, before another big bang starts it all over again. Da capo. And once again there will be a time for everything: for new games, for new and useless despairs, for new and useless hopes.
Dino Villatico
in The stratification of memory