Ensemble Phœnix Basel

The important Polish composer Ryszard Gabryś is a professor at the Katowice Academy of Music and the University of Silesia in Cieszyn. As head of the Institute for Music Education, which he founded, he has supervised almost three hundred doctoral theses and artistic dissertations. He is also the author of numerous musicological and journalistic texts as well as music series for Polish radio and television.
In his new work “Leverkühns letzter Sprechgesang” for baritone and four instruments, which will be premiered in this programme, Gabryś refers to the charismatic character Adrian Leverkühn from Thomas Mann’s novel “Doctor Faustus”, a fictional biography of a composer inspired by contemporary artistic personalities such as Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. The title of the new work is another homage to Schoenberg, the inventor of “Sprechgesang”.

His son Aleksander Gabryś has been our double bass player since 2001 and has also been active as a composer for many years. We have commissioned him to compose a piece for the next season. He writes about his planned work:
“Rio, my Rio” is a journey in sound – a homage to the forces that feed my musical imagination. The double bass takes centre stage – my leviathan, my companion since my youth, unruly and familiar at the same time. It is also a thank you to my ensemble Phoenix Basel, with whom I have been associated for a quarter of a century and who invited me to write this opus.
Like little Mio in Astrid Lindgren’s 1954 story, this piece also leaves the familiar and enters another world – sonically carried by fusion reminiscences, microtonal scales and chamber music dialogues. For me, the figure of Mio is also inextricably linked with the as yet unperformed opera “Mio, my Mio” (1969–72) by Constantin Regamey (1907–1982) – the fascinating composer, linguistic genius and thinker with whom my father once studied composition.
In a cadenza that the double bass chews through like an inner cleansing, everything flows into a cosmic vibration – delicate, distorted, united. And finally there is the name Rio, the river that recently entered my life – alive, inspiring, pushing forward. May my piece sound like this: optimistic, full of movement and quiet hope. (Aleksander Gabryś – 2025)

The Iranian composer Arash Yazdani uses texts from Iranian poetry, Martin Luther and Lao Tzu in his work “Dispersion” for qanun and ensemble. These texts are sources of inspiration for the qanun player, who interprets them on his instrument. The soloist should meditate on these verses and apply their rhythm and linguistic melody to the musical lines. Some melodic figures are taken from the traditional repertoire of Iranian music (Radif). The term “dispersion” comes from physics and describes the dispersion of a wave which, when it hits a medium, splits into its components and thus into different phase velocities. The ensemble forms a continuous flow of melodic lines and harmonic structures of pulsating beats and combination tones.

Program