Baltakas - Redditio for ensemble

Vykintas Baltakas is a musical Scheherazade. His music keeps pulling you in and referencing itself, sometimes branching off and reinventing itself, and sometimes returning to where it started.  He weaves musical stories that are linked with a delicate interconnected web.

His view of musical composition and conducting is one of reciprocity. He says that both as a composer and a conductor “you can influence the music, suggest ideas, give it direction, make decisions. You give impulses but you also receive impulses back from the music that you then process again and which then reflects back to you.”

This reciprocity creates a lineage between his works. In 2004 he started this genealogical expansion with a cycle of works. The first was Ouroboros for ensemble. A sonic object from this work – the fermata in bar 313 – germinated the next: (co)ro(na), a bright scherzo for small ensemble. The title is a little misleading in that we may mistakenly think of a fermata (or corona) as just a pause, but fermatas are full of energy at multiple levels, almost like watching a hummingbird hovering in the distance – they seem almost motionless but the energy and actual motion beneath the cool surface is tremendous. Such is the case with (co)ro(na), with energetic quivering elegantly levitating the music. This cross-pollination continues not only between pieces but also in the composition of new works, creating re-interpretations to generate successive stages of a work.

Dictionaries give the following definitions of the Latin word Redditio: a performance of a musical composition or a dramatic role; the act of interpreting something as expressed in an artistic performance.

The starting point / formal source for this work was Ri for soprano and electronics. That work was freely rethought, re-interpretated, commented on in Redditio. All musical parameters were extended: colour, harmony, space, density … until something new developed and separated itself from the source, forming different thoughts and different ways of talking.

Veronika Krausas / Vykintas Baltakas, 2010

World première: 24.10.2010, Transit Festival, Leuven, Belgium