Augustin Braud: Contremouvement

Augustin Braud holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Poitiers and the SACEM Claude Arrieu 2020 prize, awarded to a young composer of symphonic music. He was composer-in-residence at the Orchestre de Chambre Nouvelle Aquitaine for the 20172018 season and has since written Ceux qui Restentfor the Orchestre Philarmonique de RadioFrance, which was premiered and recorded in 2022 at the Festival Présences, as well as Lignier, a solo work dedicated to violinist Carolin Widmann. Other works include Stargazer for four trios, commissioned by the Nouvel Ensemble Européen and premiered at the Gaudeamus Festival in 2021, and the chamber music cycle Contremouvements. The search for expressiveness through physical and intellectual tension makes him think of the musician's gesture as pictorial with the imperium of evidence. From Mark Rothko and Anselm Kiefer he draws a plasticity stretched by mutations of sound matter. Subjected to fragmented constraints and as the forms are stretched, the fragmentary approaches the swarms evoked in Survivance des lucioles by Georges Didi-Hubermann, Contrechoqué, Contrexposé and Contrecarré, articulated in the manner of Russian dolls, plunge their roots into the same soil, questioning the material and the compressed temporality. Premising the flow over the recurrence of events, they mix interval significance and expressive modes of play chiselled intovolutes of independent lines.