Olivier Calmel: Les Improbables, Chamber Music – Thomas Bloch

Composer Olivier Calmel has decided to devote his new monograph, *Les Improbables*, to the specific field of chamber music. The common thread running through this new recording is the choice of rare instruments with unique sonorities, such as the thirteen-string koto or the glass harmonica, and a mosaic of sound textures rarely used in Western chamber music: the combination of harp, glass harmonica, and saxophone; the quartet with accordion; or the reed duo. The works recorded on *Les Improbables* are all inspired by the poetry of John Keats, Victor Hugo, Léopold Sédar Senghor, José-Maria de Heredia, and Rudyard Kipling; the visual arts of master glass artist Jeremy Maxwell Wintrebert; and tales such as “The Bamboo Chopper.” Nourished by a wide range of influences and a rich, poetic language—from the traditional music of the Mediterranean and the Balkans to the cantatas of Bach, from John Adams to Keith Jarrett—Olivier Calmel draws on a genuine fascination for rhythm, an art of counterpoint that reveals a chiseled instrumentation and constantly seeks to shift the lines, in particular by proposing to the performer the use of certain codifications of improvised music in a resolutely innovative style. A compositional aesthetic that is fully in keeping with the tradition of the forms and language of tonal, polyphonic, and percussive music.