Benet Casablancas, first Spanish composer to be featured at the Suntory Festival in Japan

Benet Casablancas, first Spanish composer to be featured at the Suntory Festival in Japan
© OBC / L´Auditori

After its New York premiere during the past month of March by the North/South Consonance Ensemble conducted by Max Lifchitz, the work Six Glosses on Texts by Cees Nooteboom will be premiered in Tokyo as part of the Summer Festival 2016 of the Suntory Foundation for Arts. The Japanese Premiere of Six Glosses will take place at the Suntory Hall in with Maestro Yasuaki Itakura conducting the Tokyo Sinfonietta within The Producer Series. This is the first time that a Spanish composer is featured in this special section of the festival. Since its creation in 2013, it is considered to be by the different artistic directors of the festival like a carte blanche, as means to disseminate the most daring, singular and exquisite contemporary music.

Even though Casablancas’s work has already been performed in Asia, the Japanese premiere of Six Glosses on Texts by Cees Nooteboom is poetically relevant due to the shared fascination by Nooteboom and the composer for Japanese culture. As an example, Casablancas’s nearly microscopic Haiku para sexteto (2013) or Siete haikus para sexteto (2015) and the confessed mutual admiration through that Asiatic connection of both reflected in recently composed works by Casablancas as Mokusei Gardens (2014) based upon the short story Mokusei! by the great Dutch author.

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