Hèctor Parra, winner of the Ernst von Siemens Composer’s Prize

Posted by Cristina Martí on May 6, 2011  |  Leave a comment

As we already announced in our blog on 14 February of this year, the Catalan Hèctor Parra will receive one of Ernst von Siemens Foundation Prizes for Music Composition on 24 May 2011.
 The award is worth 40,000 euros and includes the commission of a work for the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. Parra and co-winners, Steven Daverson and Hans Thomalla, will be given their awards during a musical celebration at the Cuvilliés Theatre in Munich, when the commissioned works written by these young composers will be premiered.

The board of trustees of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation considers Parra one of the most promising young composers: “What transpires in the music of Hector Parra is exactly what defines art: it allows us to indulge ourselves in the voluptuousness of the passing of present time.”

For Parra, this award “represents an invitation from the jury for me to be bolder in my creative work. Sometimes, you put on the brakes, you become less adventurous, because the music business, the system of commissions and concerts, saps your energy and can even make you lose your balance. This prize from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation will give me renewed energy. It’s like a special vitamin to boost my creativity.”

Read more at docenotas.com.

Contemporary music 2011

Posted by Cristina Martí on March 7, 2011  |  Leave a comment

On various Wednesdays in the months of March, April and May, the 2011 Seville Contemporary Music Cycle will be held at the Teatro Central in Seville. The programme consists of eight concerts, including works by David del Puerto, Hèctor Parra and Gabriel Erkoreka.

Specifically, on 27 April the ensemble Rejoice will perform the concert version of the work Carmen Replay by David del Puerto, and on 30 March the Ensemble Recherche will present works by Hèctor Parra and by students of the Manuel de Falla Chair of Composition at the University of Granada. In addition, on the 25 May you will be able to listen to works by another of the composers who works with Tritó, Gabriel Erkoreka, along with other contemporary composers such as Saariaho and Fineberg, at the hands of the Taller Sonoro under the joint title “Angelus Novus: el futuro presente”.

Upcoming concerts

Posted by Cristina Martí on February 21, 2011  |  1 Comment

Maybe you are still not aware that Tritó has a concert schedule, which provides details of all our composers’ musical activity, both around Spain and abroad.

To begin with, last week, on the 23 and 25 February, the Oviedo Filarmonía, under the baton of Lorenzo Ramos, performed the Tonadillas by Enric Granados with orchestration by Albert Guinovart, at the Auditorio Príncipe Felipe in Oviedo and the Madrid auditorium.

And on 26 February in Biscaya, the Orquestra Simfònica de Bilbao and the Orfeón Donostiarra continued the commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of the death Jesús Guridi, performing his “Cuadros Vascos” at the Teatro Social Antzokia in Basauri

We can recommend seven concerts in March: if you were at the Centre Pompidou in Paris on the 2^nd of the month you may have listened to the Ensemble Intercontemporain playing “Stress Tensor” by Hèctor Parra. On the 11^th, Sortilegis, by Xavier Montsalvatge, will be performed at the Teatro Monumental in Madrid by the Orquestra de RTVE, and on the following day, at the same venue and with soloists from the same orchestra, you can listen to the Quartet with oboe by Jesús Torres

Continuing in the month of March, other concerts are La rosa del azafrán, by Jacinto Guerrero in Albacete on the 18^th, Orchestral highlights from the opera Pepita Jiménez by Isaac Albéniz (edited by José de Eusebio) in Reutlingen (Germany), and the Obertura del ballet Alphonse et Léonore ou L’amant peintre by Ferran Sor in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, both on the 24^th. And lastly, on 29 March the students from the Salamanca Music Conservatory will play the Concert for bassoon and chamber ensemble by Agustí Charles

There’s sure to be something that interests you among all these works. As you know, if you want to go to a concert, consult the schedule for the next few months. Enjoy yourselves!

Hèctor Parra wins an Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation Composers’ Prize

Posted by Cristina Martí on February 14, 2011  |  1 Comment

The Barcelona composer Hèctor Parra has won one of the coveted three prizes for the promotion of new music awarded by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. He is the first Catalan to do so. The award is worth 40,000 euros and includes a commission for a work. The prize-giving act will take place on 24 May 2011 during a musical celebration at the Theatre Cuvilliés in Munich and his piece will be premiered by the Ensemble Recherche. The board of trustees of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, which includes the composers Wolfgang Rihm and Helmut Lachenmann among others, considers Parra to be one of the most promising young composers: “What transpires in the music of Hector Parra is exactly what generally tends to define art: it allows us to indulge ourselves in the voluptuousness of the passing of present time.”

In addition to Hector Parra, the British composer Steven Daverson and the German Hans Thomalla, based in the USA, received promotional prizes for young composers, while the Ernst von Siemens International Music Award, worth 200,000 euros, went to the great German composer Aribert Reimann in recognition of his complete works. The Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation distributes a total of 2.5 million euros. In 2011, it will support over one hundred contemporary music projects in twenty countries.

Hèctor Parra

Born in Barcelona in 1976, Hèctor Parra studied at the Barcelona Conservatory, where he was awarded Prizes with Distinction in Composition, Piano and Harmony. He studied piano with Mª Jesús Crespo, and composition with David Padrós, Brian Ferneyhough and Jonathan Harvey, as well as with Michael Jarrell at the Haute École de Musique in Geneva. He was an active participant in the composition workshops at Royaumont and the Centre Acanthes (France), Takefu (Japan), Impuls Graz (Austria), and he completed the International Course in Musical Composition and Computing at the IRCAM in 2002-2003. In 2004-2005 he was invited to take up a postgraduate residency at the Conservatoire Supérieur de Musique et Danse in Lyon. In 2005 he obtained a Masters in Art Aesthetics with first-class honours from the University of Paris VIII, under the tuition of Horacio Vaggione.

Despite his youth, he has a long record of composition and has received numerous awards and commissions. He currently holds the Chair of Electroacoustic Composition at the Aragon Conservatory of Music in Spain and in 2010 took up the post of lecturer in analysis and composition with the Manuel de Falla chair at the Cádiz Conservatory., He has also worked recently in close collaboration with the eminent Harvard theoretical physicist Lisa Randall in the opera “Hypermusic Prologue” and written the music for the film Equinoxe, directed by Laurent Carcélès, whose soundtrack has been recorded by the Ensemble intercontemporain.


His music is published by Editorial Tritó and, since 2010, by Universal Music Publishing (Durand, Paris) in addition. A CD with his trios and chamber music pieces performed by the Ensemble Recherche is available on the KAIROS label, as is Hypermusic Prologue, recorded by the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the IRCAM.

Hypermusic Prologue at the Gran Teatro del Liceu

Posted by Leticia Martin on November 23, 2009  |  Leave a comment

Hypermusic Prologue is, for the moment, Hèctor Parra’s most ambitious project, one of the great achievements of European contemporary music in this century. The opera libretto was written by the prestigious theoretical physicist Lisa Randall and has been published by Tritó in a clear show of support for this work by Parra and the new contemporary music.

It is new style of opera, a unique project for intercommunication between science, music and art. In this work the traditional form of opera is explored to generate a form of dramatic expression suited to the 21st century, its ideas and creative processes, including recent research into physics and its parallelisms with music and art.

Hypermusic Prologue, for soprano, baritone, ten instruments and electronics, was composed in 2008 and 2009. It was commissioned by the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), the Centre Pompidou, and the Department of Culture of the Catalan Government (Generalitat). It was premiered in Paris on 14 June 2009 as part of the programming of the Festival Agora.

Further information and tickets.

Premiere of Hypermusic Prologue, by Hèctor Parra

Posted by Marcel Soleda on June 11, 2009  |  Leave a comment

Sunday 14 June saw the premiere of “Hypermusic Prologue, a projective opera in seven planes” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, a work by the composer Hèctor Parra with a libretto by the well-known professor of theoretical physics from Harvard University, Lisa Randall.

It is new style of opera, a unique project for intercommunication between science, music and art. In this work the traditional form of opera is explored to generate a form of dramatic expression suited to the 21st century, its ideas and creative processes, including recent research into physics and its parallelisms with music and art.

Hypermusic Prologue was commissioned by the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), the Centre Pompidou itself, and the Department of Culture of the Catalan Government.

The same production will be presented at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona on 27 and 28 de November.

Information about its premiere on the Catalan Television…

Hèctor Parra in the newspaper El País

Posted by Marcel Soleda on June 10, 2009  |  Leave a comment

The journalist Javier Pérez Senz has interviewed Hèctor Parra in the Babelia section of El País (6 June). The composer discussed his projective opera “Hypermusic Prologue“, his complex creative process, and his relationship with the American theoretical physicist Lisa Randall. He also mentioned how proud he feels to have been able to work on such a project with the Ensemble Intercontemporain.

“What I aim for as a creator is to move the listeners, stir their spirits and open up their imaginations to new sound energies in the awareness that, in a nutshell, composing is searching for oneself”.

A face-to-face encounter with the composer that preluded the première, which took place on 14 June at the Centre Pompidou in the French capital.

Link to the interview.

Opera 2.0 (3rd part)

Posted by Marcel Soleda on June 8, 2009  |  Leave a comment

In the last video of the series, the theoretical physicist and Harvard professor Lisa Randall, author of the libretto, talks about Hypermusic Prologue. The idea for the libretto came from one of her best-known books, “Warped passages” which was a best seller in the United States.

In Hypermusic Prologue, science, music and plastic arts find a meeting point in this innovative score, whose central character is a composer-scientist (soprano) torn between the love she feels for her partner (baritone) and her passion for research, her conviction that there is a much bigger world than we know waiting to be explored.

Opera 2.0 (2nd part)

Posted by Marcel Soleda on June 2, 2009  |  Leave a comment

The second part of the preparations for the premiere of Hypermusic Prologue, a new type of opera. This video focuses on the set design and the scenery, by the set designer Paul Desveaux and the artist Matthew Ritchie.

Opera 2.0 (1st part)

Posted by Leticia Martin on May 28, 2009  |  Leave a comment

Hypermusic Prologue, the opera by Hèctor Parra with a libretto by Lisa Randall, will be premiered in Paris on 14 June at the Centre Pompidou. During the two weeks leading up to this premiere we have been able to take a closer look at the Ensemble Intercontemporain’s work on its development and production, through the rehearsals and other videos with previous information.

Thanks to Youtube we can personally experience the birth of an opera in the 21st century.