Memoires Vivantes [CD]

As part of the Cultural Olympiad, the vocal ensemble Sequenza 9.3 spent three years collecting traditional oral songs throughout Seine-Saint-Denis, a region home to 175 nationalities. Entrusted to contemporary composers, these songs were transformed into a new polyphonic repertoire. The album Mémoires vivantes brings together fifteen of these works: Corsican and Andalusian lullabies, a funeral lament, a Greek sailors' song, an Anatolian nursery rhyme, an Albanian song from the Ottoman era, an Indian melody, a song from China's Qing dynasty, Violeta Parra's hymn to life, and more. Shaped and refined over generations, these fragments of collective memory have crossed borders and centuries alike before finding new resonance, under the direction of Catherine Simonpietri, in the voices of Sequenza 9.3's twelve singers alongside the instrumental ensemble Opus 333.