Claude à Wimbledon – For ensemble and tape
Music composed by: Hilario Flores-Coni
Performed by: HEM Ensemble 21, conducted by Hilario Flores-Coni at the Auditorium Ansermet, Geneva, May 2024.
Debussy is wearing his sunglasses and sitting at a tennis match in Wimbledon. The usual, stereo “poc… poc…poc” sound the ball makes every time it’s hit is immediately followed by thousands of spectators turning their head in sync to follow it. Today, Claude is a spectator too, and thus shifts his head accordingly to avoid being commented upon (“always yell with the crowd” said George Orwell a few years later… “it’s the only way to be safe”). However, inside Claude’s turning head, a different show is playing. The tennis match in his brain is developing in a surreal fashion; where the crowd hears a “poc” he hears a slow “pluuuummm”; a big stone gently falling upwards… into an inverted, lime-green and purple lake… and of which he finds himself enjoying its concentric, undulating water circles (the stone has induced these), only to find this was just the ball hitting the net. Musical fragments come to his mind over and over: there is a melody beginning to take shape… and every time the whistling of the ball’s trajectory left to right, right to left suddenly becomes slow… and perhaps reminiscent of the counterpoint exercises he did when he was just a young lad in Paris… the tennis game comes back distorted, again and again disrupting his thoughts and mingling with them.