03.04.25 / Solitude sonore (Solitude in sound)

About the piece

Amid some of Federico Mompou’s major work, the four books of Música Callada for piano were composed between 1951 and 1967. These 28 short pieces invite us both to listen to our own intimate space and to contemplate sonic spaces.

The sounds and resonances of bells, a souvenir of the family foundry, have shaped the harmony of the Catalan composer’s music. Combining his Spanish roots with a French Impressionist heritage, he created the conditions for a ‘distended auditory tolerance’ that never broke with an ideal of sonic voluptuousness. Mompou wanted his Música Callada to ‘lead us to a new warmth of life and to the expression of the human heart, always the same and always renewed’.

Such an intimate listening seems to take its inspiration from the lines of the great Spanish mystic, Saint John of the Cross: ‘The quiet night that precedes / The awakening of the dawn’.

This concert celebrates the release of the album ‘Música Callada’ recorded by Thérèse Malengreau for the French label Soupir Edition.

Biography

Imagination, coherence, and originality characterize the concerts and recordings of Belgian pianist Thérèse Malengreau.

Her repertoire shows a definite predilection for music from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as for contemporary music; she discovered and premiered numerous scores from the past and present, as her extensive discography attests. The relation between music, the visual arts, and literature is central to her research and career, sometimes leading her to work in close connection with exhibitions and international artistic projects (Musée d’Orsay, Grand Palais, Centre Pompidou Metz, Marta Herford, etc.).

As an extension of her artistic career, Thérèse Malengreau teaches piano and comparative aesthetics of the arts. She also participates in the work of the Belgian and French Societies of Musical Analysis and is part of an artistic research group at the Antwerp Conservatoire. Born into a family of artists, she holds several Master’s degrees from the Brussels Royal Conservatory of Music as well as a Master’s degree in Romance philology from the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB).