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2026 Edition — Peter Ablinger and Thirty Years of Cantica Symphonia
Saturday, November 28, 6:00 pm – Sala Italo Tajo
The concert spans seven centuries of musical history, bringing Peter Ablinger’s exploration of sound perception into dialogue with the vocal music of the fifteenth-century composer Guillaume Dufay.
Two worlds separated by time, yet united by a particular attention to the voice, its structure, and the possibilities of musical writing to convey its complexity.
In the Piano and Voices cycle, Ablinger places the piano in dialogue with recordings of speech, interviews, and readings. The voices are not sung but spoken, while the piano analyses and translates their sonic characteristics. As the composer himself explains, “the piano part constitutes a temporal and spectral scan of the respective voice”, a kind of coarse-grained snapshot of spoken language. The piano does not therefore accompany the voice, but observes and compares it, establishing a relationship between reality and perception, between what is said and the way we hear it. Performed by Ana Ostojić, the works in the cycle thus turn speech into musical material, bringing the very act of listening to the fore. Completing the section devoted to Ablinger, Weiss / Weisslich 31e explores the limits of audibility through the sound of water, performed by Sylvain Lemêtre.
The second part of the concert celebrates Cantica Symphonia’s thirtieth anniversary with a programme devoted to Guillaume Dufay, a central figure in the ensemble’s history. Since 1998, the group has devoted six recordings to his music, several of which have received major international awards, including the Diapason d’or de l’année. The choice also carries a particular significance for Pinerolo: according to documentary tradition, Dufay is believed to have stayed there in 1438 as part of the retinue of the House of Savoy.
In his motets, Dufay’s writing reflects the complexity of a period of transition between the tradition of the Ars nova and the emerging Renaissance language. Alongside monumental celebratory motets, associated with important political and ecclesiastical occasions, are more intimate and devotional works, in which the rigour of contrapuntal structures gives way to a more fluid, song-like style. The variety of these forms reveals the richness of a body of work that combines compositional rigour, melodic clarity, and a new attentiveness to the expressive possibilities of the voice.
Program
➺ Piano and Voice (1998) by Peter Ablinger
cycle for piano and fixed media
Featuring the voices of: Pier Paolo Pasolini · Morton Feldman · Angela Davis · Billie Holiday · Mother Teresa · Nina Simone · Valentina Tereshkova · Lola Kipeja
➺ Weiss / Weisslich 31e (1996) by Peter Ablinger
for amplified glass tubes and water drops
➺ From the Motets of Guillame Dufay (c.1392)
Apostolo glorioso · Alma redemptoris mater · Gaude virgo mater Christi · Imperatrix angelorum · Ave regina · Rite maiorem · Flos florum · Supremum est mortalibus
Ana Ostojić
(piano)
Ensemble Cairn
Sylvain Lemêtre (percussion)
Marco Marasciuolo
SMET Scuola di Musica Elettronica del Conservatorio di Torino, (sound direction)
Cantica Symphonia
Alena Dantcheva (soprano), Laura Fabris (soprano), Giuseppe Maletto (tenor and conductor), Marco Scavazza (baritone), Guido Magnano (organ), Efix Puleo (vielle), Laura Bertolino (vielle), Marta Graziolino (harp), Mauro Morini (trombone, slide trumpet)
2026 Edition — Peter Ablinger and Thirty Years of Cantica Symphonia
Saturday, November 28, 6:00 pm – Sala Italo Tajo
Ana Ostojić
Ana Ostojić (1996) is a Serbian pianist based in Austria whose work spans the classical repertoire, contemporary music, performance, experimental music, and free improvisation. She performs as a soloist and with chamber and ensemble formations across Europe and Asia, appearing at international festivals and venues including Wiener Konzerthaus, Suntory Summer Hall Festival in Tokyo, Tongyeong Festival in South Korea, Steirischer Herbst, Impuls, Days of New Piano Music, Elevate Festival and Graz Improv Fest in Austria, Milano Musica, Reate Festival in Rome and Reggio Parma Festival in Italy, and the Festival for New Music in Cyprus, among others.
She is a member of Zeitfluss Ensemble and the Styrian Improvisers Orchestra, co-founder of Coincidence Ensemble, and a regular collaborator with Klangforum Wien and Schallfeld Ensemble. Together with soprano Laure-Catherine Beyers, she forms Duo Ardea, with whom she won First Prize at the IVC Theatre in Song 2025 in the Netherlands and at the Luigi Nono Competition 2026 in Turin, as well as Third Prize at the Schubert and Modern Music Competition in Graz. She has worked closely with composers including Helmut Lachenmann, Beat Furrer, Peter Ablinger, Carola Bauckholt, and Matthew Shlomowitz, and has recorded for GOD Records and Graz-based Murmurs Label.
2026 Edition — Peter Ablinger and Thirty Years of Cantica Symphonia
Saturday, November 28, 6:00 pm – Sala Italo Tajo
Ensemble Cairn
Founded in 1998 and directed by Jérôme Combier, Ensemble Cairn is one of France’s most active ensembles in the creation and dissemination of contemporary music. The name Cairn refers to the piles of stones that mark mountain paths: an image that reflects the ensemble’s desire to conceive each concert as a listening journey, bringing different pieces of music into dialogue around a shared idea. Its activity combines new music for ensemble and chamber music, while opening up a dialogue with visual arts and other artistic forms.
It has collaborated with composers and artists including Gérard Pesson, Tristan Murail, Philippe Leroux, Francesco Filidei, Noriko Baba and Franck Bedrossian. Cairn has appeared at international festivals and institutions including IRCAM, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Archipel, Darmstadt, Villa Medici and Philharmonie de Paris. In 2023, it presented the world premiere of L’Annonce faite à Marie by Philippe Leroux. Its discography includes music by Pesson, Murail, Combier, Lazkano and Lucas Fagin.
2026 Edition — Peter Ablinger and Thirty Years of Cantica Symphonia
Saturday, November 28, 6:00 pm – Sala Italo Tajo
Peter Ablinger
Peter Ablinger (1959-2025) was an Austrian composer and artist whose work radically challenged established musical conventions. After studying graphic arts, he became involved in free jazz and went on to study composition with Gösta Neuwirth and Roman Haubenstock-Ramati in Graz and Vienna. His work focused on the nature of sound, exploring the relationships between sound and silence, the audible and the inaudible, presence and absence. Through instrumental and electronic music, performance, and installation, Ablinger explored the limits of perceptual experience by manipulating parameters such as intensity, frequency, duration, speed, and density, and investigating the thresholds at which sound can change, become more sparse or more concentrated, and eventually disappear, taking on different sensory qualities. His work thus engaged with fundamental musical concepts such as time and space, while also exploring phenomena including repetition, monotony, reduction, redundancy, density, and noise.
From 1982 onwards, he lived and worked in Berlin, where he organised numerous festivals and concerts and founded Ensemble Zwischentöne in 1988. From 1990, he worked as an independent musician, combining composition with performing, curatorial work, and teaching. He was Research Professor at the University of Huddersfield from 2012 to 2017 and Guest Professor at the Royal Conservatory The Hague and Leiden University in 2019. He also worked as a guest conductor with ensembles including Klangforum Wien, United Berlin, and Insel Musik Ensemble, while maintaining a continuous practice of independent teaching and working with private students from 2000 onwards.
His compositions have been performed at major international festivals, including the Berliner Festwochen, Wiener Festwochen, Darmstadt, and Donaueschingen, while his installations have been presented at institutions and exhibition spaces such as Kunsthalle Wien, the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Kunsthaus Graz, and the Santa Monica Museum of the Arts.
2026 Edition — Peter Ablinger and Thirty Years of Cantica Symphonia
Saturday, November 28, 6:00 pm – Sala Italo Tajo
Cantica Symphonia
Founded in 1996, Cantica Symphonia is a vocal and instrumental ensemble specialising in repertoire from the early Renaissance to the Baroque, and is widely recognised for its interpretations of Renaissance polyphony. Bringing together singers and instrumentalists with extensive experience in historically informed performance, the ensemble develops its interpretations through in-depth study of original sources, with particular attention to the interplay between voices and instruments and to the structural and expressive richness of the music.
Its discography includes recordings for Stradivarius, devoted to the motets of Costanzo Festa and the sacred music of Dufay, made with Kees Boeke as guest conductor, and for Opus 111, including a CD dedicated to French ars nova from the Ivrea Codex. Since 2005, the ensemble has recorded for Glossa, with which it has released numerous CDs and received six Diapason d’Or awards. Among these, Quadrivium, devoted to Dufay’s motets and produced in collaboration with the University of Turin, received the Diapason d’Or de l’année 2005 and a Choc from Le Monde de la Musique. In 2016, together with La Compagnia del Madrigale and La Pifarescha, Cantica Symphonia recorded Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine, which received the prestigious Japanese Record Academy Award.
Cantica Symphonia has performed at numerous international festivals and institutions, including the Festival Oude Muziek in Utrecht, Festival van Vlaanderen, Tage Alter Musik in Regensburg, MITO SettembreMusica, Ravenna Festival, Unione Musicale in Turin, and Les Concerts Parisiens, as well as in the Sistine Chapel and at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris. Its repertoire ranges from Dufay, Busnoys, Josquin Desprez, Morales, Andrea Gabrieli, Monteverdi, Cavalli, Buxtehude, Purcell, and Bach to new works by Filippo Del Corno, Carlo Galante, and Yakov Gubanov, written specifically for the ensemble.
2026 Edition — Peter Ablinger and Thirty Years of Cantica Symphonia
Saturday, November 28, 6:00 pm – Sala Italo Tajo
Guillaume Dufay
Guillaume Dufay (c. 1397–1474) was one of the most important and influential composers of the fifteenth century. His output encompasses the major musical forms of his time, from masses and motets to secular songs, and reflects a synthesis of traditions from different regions, including Italy, the Franco-Flemish world, and England. His music thus bears witness to the transition from a musical language still deeply rooted in the medieval tradition to the new sensibility that would come to define the Renaissance.
His motets are particularly significant, encompassing a range of distinct stylistic approaches. In his isorhythmic and occasional motets, Dufay creates imposing musical structures designed to impress the listener and to assert ecclesiastical and secular power on important historical occasions, such as the appointment of senior prelates or peace treaties between the papacy and the Empire. These works are shaped by the strict mathematical principles inherited from the fourteenth-century Ars Nova, with the rhythms and melodies of the structural tenor recurring according to precise proportional schemes. Yet even within this rigorous framework, Dufay’s humanist sensibility comes to the fore: at times, the intricate mathematical structure gives way to solemn, static chords that spell out the names of the powerful figures being honoured, combining political homage with a striking sense of drama.
Alongside this public and celebratory dimension, Dufay developed a more intimate and flexible body of sacred music, particularly in his Marian motets. These works are characterised by a distinctive harmonic sweetness, as the composer moves away from rigid contrapuntal structures towards a freer, more flowing style, often described as cantillated or discant. The upper voice takes centre stage, unfolding supple, graceful, and elegantly ornamented melodies. The harmony acquires a distinctly more modern character through the systematic use of thirds and sixths, creating a warm and resonant sonority far removed from the austerity of the medieval tradition. The liturgical text, no longer obscured by the complex polyphony of earlier music, becomes clearer and more intelligible, reflecting a new sensibility that anticipates the Humanism of the Renaissance.
This gradual humanisation of sacred music reaches its emotional and spiritual high point in works from the final years of Dufay’s life. In these late compositions, the impersonal character of medieval prayer gives way to a distinctly Renaissance sense of individual expression. Dufay no longer simply sets a sacred text to music, but introduces a personal supplication, weaving his own name into the polyphonic texture as he asks for mercy in anticipation of the end of his life. In these masterpieces, musical technique is stripped of intellectual display and becomes a vehicle for deeply personal expression, marking Dufay’s transformation from a masterful craftsman into one of the first great modern composers in the history of Western music.
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