The piercing call of the carnyx likely sounded across Lake Lucerne more than 2,000 years ago, when Celtic tribes settled in Central Switzerland. Liza Lim has composed a concerto for this ancient bronze trumpet, nearly two meters long, asking herself “how ancient lineages of human and more-than-human creativity reside in bodies, cultural artefacts and the Deep Time histories of place, carrying seeds of resilience and also potential danger that may yet bloom again.” Far less exotic is the second solo instrument of the evening, the clarinet. Yet composer-in-residence Mark Andre — inspired by extensive sound experiments with Jörg Widmann — coaxes from it a wealth of entirely new timbres. From key clicks, electronically altered breaths, and whisper-thin multiphonics, he shapes a fragile sound world hovering at the brink of silence. The evening ultimately leads us to America as well: in his opera Doctor Atomic, which he has distilled into a brilliantly colored symphony for the concert hall, John Adams grapples with the legacy of the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico.
