Oxalys Ensemble - Belgian Music Days

In the relentless search for (Belgian) unknown chamber music repertoire that has characterized Oxalys for so many years, about fifteen years ago we came across the small, but magnificent oeuvre of the Liège composer Georges Antoine. Born in 1892 and passed away far too young on November 15, 1918, four days after the armistice. His long stay in the trenches had completely exhausted him due to his already weak health. Not only his early passing, but also his style of composition immediately remind one of that other Franco-Belgian composer: Guillaume Lekeu. A violin sonata and a piano quartet both form the peak in their respective chamber music oeuvres. A student of Lekeu, who also passed away before his fortieth year, is the composer Albrecht Huybrechts, born in Dinant. He was admitted to the Brussels Conservatory at the age of 11 and left us an once again limited, but magnificent oeuvre. In 1926, after receiving the prestigious Coolidge Prize for his violin sonata, which was premiered in New York with the top French pianist Alfred Cortot at the keyboard, he wrote a trio for the slightly less common instrumentation: flute, viola & piano. Huybrechts’ style sits somewhere between Debussy & Ravel and the modernism of Stravinsky and Bartók. In the second movement, you hear the French refinement of timbre and harmony on the one hand, while the outer movements have a more angular, rhythmic, and earthy approach. During its existence, Oxalys has also given quite a few composition commissions to Belgian composers. The Antwerp composer Bram Van Camp could not be missing from that list. Voor Oxalys wrote Van Camp in 2017 Mozart’s dissonance; a work that had to take center stage in a Mozart program. Van Camp tries to investigate what happens when you detach Mozartian dissonances from their tonal function. In In Mozarts music, dissonances often arise as non-harmonic tones within a melodic ornamentation. They create tension, but are subsequently absorbed into a consonant chord. Van Camp takes precisely those dissonant harmonies and says as it were: what if we do not resolve that dissonance? He identified about 15 four-note chords that literally occur in Mozart's music, including their inversions. He then places them in a non-tonal context. As a result, their function changes completely: what is a temporary tension in Mozart becomes an independent sound element in Van Camp. Van Camp not only dissects the harmony, but also the phrasing of Mozart. He notes that Mozart's phrasing often appears very natural and symmetrical, but upon closer inspection can be surprisingly asymmetrical. That asymmetry becomes a starting point for the rhythmic structure of Mozart’s dissonance in Van Camp.