Length: approximately 2 hours
Folk Songs
Simon Steen-Andersen deconstructs stylistic elements with a sharp, almost forensic electronic lens trained on the grosso soloists. Diana Soh, meanwhile, revisits the music of her childhood in Singapore, weaving its echoes into her latest creation. Sung by Rinat Shaham, her work resonates with Luciano Berio’s iconic Folk Songs. Rejecting the artificiality of folk melodies accompanied by piano, Berio reimagined them with orchestration and vocal techniques, transforming the oral traditions of Sardinia, Sicily, and Armenia into written form. Was this twentieth-century vision of expressive, universalizing utopia merely an ideal—or does it still resonate in the twenty-first? This question lingers in the grand orchestral finale of ManiFeste-2025, performed by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France.
Rinat Shaham mezzo-soprano
Yarn/Wire
Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France
Lin Liao conductor
Dionysios Papanikolaou, Manuel Poletti IRCAM electronics
Jérémie Bourgogne IRCAM sound diffusion
Simon Steen-Andersen grosso - French Premiere
Commissioned by the SWR, Radio France, Aarhus Symphonic Orchestra, IRCAM-Centre Pompidou, with the support of the Fondation Pierre Boulez
Diana Soh Songs from whence I came - Premiere 2025
Commissioned by IRCAM-Centre Pompidou, Radio France
Luciano Berio Folk songs
