SPECTRA, Filip Rathé, Julien Libeer

In the five movements of his phenomenal piano cycle Miroirs, Ravel gives his imagination free rein: butterflies and birds flutter over the keys, a boat bobs in an ocean of sound, a jester romps about on the strings and church bells peal out over an immense valley. 

In this concert, SPECTRA has added an extra layer of reflection to each of these ‘miroirs’: Saariaho reinvents the butterflies and Satoh the birds; Murail drops another boat on the water, Sciarrino manipulates the boundaries of the night, and Fafchamps expands the reverberations of the bells. 

Mirror of Mirrors is a programme that invites you to immerse yourself in your own imagination. Julien Libeer plays the original ‘mirrors’ (Ravel is one of his favourite composers) on an Erard grand piano from Ravel’s time. The SPECTRA musicians, for over thirty years experts in music from after 1950 and praised time and again for their versatility and precision, will present the new reflections, in changing combinations of one to seven musicians.