Cherche titre: music by Mikel Urquiza Marion Tassou & L’Instant Donné

• Mikel Urquiza (b. 1988): I nalt be clode on the frolt:
• 1 Urquiza: I nalt be clode on the frolt: I. Cherche titre 02:46
• 2 Urquiza: I nalt be clode on the frolt: II. Cherche femme 02:33
• 3 Urquiza: I nalt be clode on the frolt: III. Cherche maison 02:44
• 4 Urquiza: I nalt be clode on the frolt: IV. Vend maison 02:15
• 5 Urquiza: I nalt be clode on the frolt: V. The wind that blows is all that anybody knows 02:16
• Contrapluma:
• 6 Urquiza: Contrapluma 06:36
• Cinq pièges brefs:
• 7 Urquiza: Cinq pièges brefs: I. Appeau 01:10
• 8 Urquiza: Cinq pièges brefs: II. Hameçon 01:31
• 9 Urquiza: Cinq pièges brefs: III. Collet 01:45
• 10 Urquiza: Cinq pièges brefs: IV. Miroir 01:05
• 11 Urquiza: Cinq pièges brefs: V. Filet 02:45
• Serpientes y escaleras (serenata):
• 12 Urquiza: Serpientes y escaleras (serenata) 09:46
• Les lueurs se sont multipliées:
• 13 Urquiza: Les lueurs se sont multipliées: Prologue 01:31
• 14 Urquiza: Les lueurs se sont multipliées: I. Stanza di Livia 02:36
• 15 Urquiza: Les lueurs se sont multipliées: II. Clair de lune au bosco 02:47
• 16 Urquiza: Les lueurs se sont multipliées: III. Les lueurs se sont multipliées. Épilogue 03:41
• Zintzil:
• 17 Urquiza: Zintzil 08:28
• Total Runtime 56:15

Info for Cherche titre: music by Mikel Urquiza

Acclaimed ensemble L’Instant Donné presents "Cherche titre", an album of world-premiere recordings of music by Spanish composer Mikel Urquiza, who just received the Composers’ Prize 2022 of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. Full of verve and sparkle, Mikel Urquiza’s music delicately flirts with burlesque, twists melodies and toys with clichés, a playfulness well suited to this ensemble.

Mikel Urquiza studied composition with fellow Odradek artist Ramon Lazkano; in 2019, Urquiza was sponsored by the Peter Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation and in 2020 became resident of the Académie de France in Rome – Villa Médicis. Working without a conductor, L'Instant Donné was founded in 2002 and is located in Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis), Paris, in a vast studio equipped with an extensive range of instruments.

The scores drawn together on this album brim with joyful musical tricks and discoveries, teeming with incongruous gestures that create a sense of amusement ingeniously governed by a coherent system of rules. Mikel Urquiza’s music takes shape with great definition of timbre and an extreme precision of narrative, phrasing and rhythmic accuracy.

As L'Instant Donné put it in the album booklet, this music demands that they “find a common alchemy – a mixture of rigour and fantasy, constraint and flexibility – to transcend the rules of the game in order to give body and life to this alert, mischievous, sometimes strange music which owes nothing to chance. And this is precisely what drives us at L’Instant Donné: finding common breath in music. Mikel Urquiza understands this perfectly and offers us scores that fully exploit the potential of our ensemble”.

Marion Tassou, soprano
L'Instant Donne

Please Note: We offer this album in its native sampling rate of 48 kHz, 24-bit. The provided 96 kHz version was up-sampled and offers no audible value!

Marion Tassou
was born in Nantes and graduated from the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique in Lyon. She has performed roles such as Melanto in Il ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria, Vénus in Le Carnaval et la Folie von Destouches, Euridice in Orfeo ed Euridice, Ilia in Idomeneo, Zerlina in Don Giovanni, Contessa in Le Nozze di Figaro, Pamina in Die Zauberflöte, Pauline in La Vie Parisienne, Mahenu in L’île du rêve (Reynaldo Hahn), Blanche de La Force in Dialogues des Carmélites on stages such as the Saint Céré Festival, the Tours Opera, the Montpellier Opera and the Hamburg State Opera.

After being a member of the Académie of the Opéra Comique in 2013/14, she took part in three world premieres: L'Autre hiver by Dominique Pauwels and Beach Bosch by Vasco Mendonça with LOD Muziektheater in Ghent as well as Le Mystère de l'écureuil bleu by Marc-Olivier Dupin at the Opéra Comique. In 2019/20 she is making her debut at the Théâtre du Capitole in Toulouse (Parsifal).

In concert, she has recently been touring Schönberg's Pierrot Lunaire with the ensemble La Belle Saison and sung Hiérophanie by Claude Vivier in Paris and Berlin with the Ensemble Intercontemporain.

Her plans in 2020/21 include two scenic productions with the Ensemble Les Frivolités Parisiennes: Normandie by Paul Misraki (role of Barbara) in Charleroi, Amiens, Le Havre and at the Théâtre de l'Athénée Louis Jouvet in Paris as well as Le Diable à Paris by Marcel Lattès (role of Marguerite) at the Théâtre de l'Athénée Louis Jouvet in Paris. Due to the safety crisis, both productions, alas, couldn't see the public.

In 2021/22 she takes part in the production of "Cole (Porter)" with the ensemble Les Frivolités Parisiennes at La Coursive in La Rochelle and at the Théâtre du Châtelet. For the first time she performs at the famous Folle Journée de Nantes and at the Festival of La Roque d'Anthéron. She also can be heard in Mozart's Requiem at the Festival "Idéal au Potager du Roi" in Versailles, with the Orchestre Consuleo conducted by Victor Julien-Laferrière.

Marion Tassou has collaborated with conductors such as Alexis Kossenko, Hervé Niquet, Matthias Pintscher, François-Xavier Roth and Jean-Christophe Spinosi.

Her discography includes works by Gérard Pesson with the Ensemble Instant Donné (label NoMadMusic, 2018) and the Stabat Mater by Francis Poulenc with the Brussels Philharmonic and Hervé Niquet (label Evil Penguin, 2019).

Booklet for Cherche titre: music by Mikel Urquiza