Ramon Lazkano's music core is the instrumental and vocal composition. His residences in Rome at the Royal Academy of Spain and the Academy of France allowed him to carry out a reflection focused on intertextuality and silence which gave birth to emblematic pieces such as Ilunkor (for the Basque National Orchestra), Hauskor (for the Orquesta de la Comunidad de Madrid) and Ortzi Isilak (for the Orquesta Nacional de España). In June 2012, Peter Eötvös conducted Ilunkor with the Bayerischer Rundfunk Symphonieorchester at the Munich Musica Viva series, while the Venice Biennale programmed Ortzi Isilak with Shizuyo Oka and the Basque National Orchestra in 2014. From 2001 to 2011 he wrote the Chalk Laboratory, a collection of chamber music echoing Jorge Oteiza's "experimental laboratory", its US premiere took place at the Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles in 2015. In 2016, the Festival d’Automne à Paris offered a portrait in several concerts and premiered Ravel (Scènes), fragments for a stage work in progress based on Jean Echenoz novel. His latter works not only pay new attention to architecture and duration as in Lurralde, written for the Quatuor Diotima, but also adopt engaged texts by Rosa Luxemburg in Eine Ehrenpflicht, and Edmond Jabès in Ceux à Qui - written for the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart and getting its US premiere with Ensemble Talea in New York in 2016. Recent highlights include Ziaboga, premiered by the Ensemble Intercontemporain and Matthias Pintscher in 2019, Irarki commissioned by the Witten Musiktage 2020 and the piano concerto Mare Marginis (commissioned by Radio France, WDR Köln and the Basque National Orchestra) premiered by Alexandre Tharaud in 2023. He has been awarded the Prince Pierre de Monaco Foundation Prize and the Georges Bizet Prize of the French Academy of Fine Arts, among other distinctions. Ramon Lazkano studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Alain Bancquart and Gérard Grisey and is a former fellow of the Civitella-Ranieri Foundation. He is a composition professor at Musikene, the Basque Country Higher Academy of Music. www.lazkano.eu
Ramon Lazkano's piece A Glitch at the Edge premiered with the Grossman Ensemble on September 30, 2023.
Program notes:
To Augusta Read Thomas
The unexpected commission of this piece has been a breach in the continuity of the mutating sound emerging in my last works. The unusual ratio between the number of players and its total duration has also been a challenge. This fragment operates as an introspective tool, recalling the instrumental means of my recent works and their obsolescence. The composer becomes a funambulist in search for an improbable balance, and his tightrope the metaphor of the malfunction of an instrumental and temporal set. Signals with elusive meaning, familiar figures unable to remain still, transient rhythms chaining the continuity of an uncomfortable sound, give shape to this inner listening impossible to be grasped. The exhaustion of the effort to hear the inner vibration of the sound in us reminds us of Sloterdijk: the thought rip