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Olivier Calmel: Les Improbables on CD

Composer Olivier Calmel has decided to devote his new monograph Les Improbables to the specific field of chamber music. The common thread running through this new recording is the choice of rare instruments with unique sonorities, such as the thirteen-string koto or the glass harmonica, and a mosaic of sound textures rarely used in Western chamber music: the combination of harp, glass harmonica and saxophone, the quartet with accordion or the reed duo. The works recorded on Les Improbables are all inspired by the poetry of John Keats, Victor Hugo, Léopold Sédar Senghor, José-Maria de Heredia and Rudyard Kipling, the visual arts of master glass artist Jeremy Maxwell Wintrebert, and tales such as The Bamboo Chopper. Nourished by a wide range of influences and a rich, poetic language, from the traditional music of the Mediterranean and the Balkans to the cantatas of Bach, from John Adams to Keith Jarrett, Olivier Calmel draws on a genuine fascination for rhythm, an art of counterpoint that reveals a chiselled instrumentation and constantly seeks to shift the lines, in particular by proposing to the performer the use of certain codifications of improvised music in a resolutely innovative style. A compositional aesthetic that is fully in keeping with the tradition of the forms and language of tonal, polyphonic, and percussive music.