Arxis Ensemble

Clara Giner, flauta
Cèlia Tort, oboe
Sergi Bayarri, clarinet
Álvaro Prieto, fagot
Iñigo Setuaín, saxofon
Actur Jorge, trompa
Luis Serrapio, trompeta
Adrián Albaladejo, trombó
Noè Rodrigo, percussió
Sabela Castro, percusión
Magdalena Cerezo, piano
Nikola Tanaskovic, acordió
Rachel Koblyakov, violí
Rebeca Maseda Longarela, violí
María Luisa Sopeña, viola
Anna Grenzner, violoncel
Zacharias Fasshauer, contrabaix
Nacho de Paz, director
Hugo Gómez-Chao, direcció artística

‘Still’ (1998) Beat Furrer (1954) 13’
‘Gran Hotel Abismo’ (2021) Claudia Cañamero (1995) 12’
‘La lumière du noir’ (2012) Alberto Posadas (1967) 17’
‘Libro delle immagini V-im Weiten, Leichten, Kalten’
(2023) Hugo Gómez-Chao (1995) 14’ (*work carried out during his stay at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome)

With the collaboration of the Festival Resis de Musica Contemporánea de A Coruña and the Asociación Cultural AÏS.

‘Still’ (1998) by the Swiss composer Beat Furrer is a work that splits up many continuously filtered lines into counterpoint. The overlaying of these lines progresses gradually from harmony to noise, like a text that is being read many times by different voices, and which little by little loses its meaning.

‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ (2021) is a commission from the
Valencia Institute for Culture entrusted to the Valencian composer based in Graz, Claudia Cañamero. In this work, a group of instruments create gestures; figures that are heard and which are based on a conversation between Georg Lukács and Theodor Adorno about the Frankfurt School. “You’re staying at the Grand Hotel Abyss, while you criticise the capitalist world on the brink of collapse.
The feeling that something is about to break makes us feel, nevertheless, that we are in a safe place.”

‘Lumiere du noir’ (2010) by the composer Alberto Posadas is a great treatise on sound matter, where different textures create a dense space, with crescendos that allow the sound to darken or find new glimmers. In this work, the harmony of the harmonic spectrum is so dense that we often feel that the instrumental ensemble is immense, that the entire space resonates by itself like a great cavern, that everything may explode into a thousand smithereens at any moment.

‘Libro delle immagini V – im Weiten, Leichten, Kalten’ (2023) is one of the pieces written by the composer Hugo Gómez-Chao Porta during his stay at the Royal Academy of Spain in 2022–2023. In the words of the composer himself: “And as the only answer, wind. And against that wind, appearing,
rising, crossing the space, some signs: flesh, agitation of the flesh, figures and bodies made up of absence, bodies disappearing into the violence of that whirlwind. It is a disastrous escape in the middle of the night. And then, dawn breaks. A minimal, very distant memory emerges. Suddenly, something sounds elsewhere. We turn our heads. And it is already gone.”

Arxis Ensemble is a contemporary music group that was born with the aim of being a meeting point between performers, creators and the public in the field of music today. It focuses its activity on working hand in hand with composers of our time, as well as on national and international exchanges to position Galicia as one of the centers of avant-garde art. Committed to programming repertoire of music from the last fifty years, ARXIS Ensemble aims to open dialogues on recent creation through concerts, conferences and workshops, linking music with other artistic disciplines.

Its members focus their activity on the interpretation, research and enhancement of avant-garde music. They participate in multidisciplinary projects, musical theater, opera, performance, improvisation and electronic music, continually rethinking the role of the musician today, his connection with listening and the search for innovation in sound art.

During its first season in 2022, Arxis Ensemble had Aitor Vázquez Torres as Guest Conductor, and Igor C Silva as Resident Composer. During this first cycle of concerts, he carried out various activities and concerts around the centenary of the birth of Iannis Xenakis, which reached its peak with the performance of the percussion sextet “Pléïades” within the framework of the V RESIS Festival of Contemporary Music.

Arxis Ensemble has also been directed by Beat Furrer, together with whom he performed the premiere in Spain of the work “Akusmata”, by Furrer himself. Performance that took place in collaboration with the Austrian vocal ensemble Cantando Admont. In 2023, the Arxis Ensemble has premiered in Spain La lumiére de noir, by Alberto Posadas.