Lucerne Festival Academy 4

The orchestra here, the solo instrument there. They play with or against each other. They flirt or they just toss notes around. Because the instrumental concerto opens up countless possibilities for how it can be shaped, it remains a successful model today. In Come Play with Me, composer-in-residence Marco Stroppa juxtaposes an electronic virtuoso in lieu of a flesh-and-blood one with the orchestra. The computer-generated sounds do not float invisibly in the room but take on a suggestive visual presence thanks to a tall column of seven speakers suspended in a spiral. It is “not an instrument,” explains Stroppa,  “but a polymorphic being and represents the archetype of all soloists.” Pierre Boulez similarly broke new ground when he began working on his first major orchestral piece at the end of the 1950s. Figures — Doubles — Prismes abandons the usual seating arrangement of the musicians in favor of many small ensembles distributed across the stage. This enabled Boulez to make sounds travel through the orchestra, to subtly fan them out and to achieve smooth transitions from solo to ensemble passages.