Inside Metropolis (2023)
(for large orchestra)

In Inside Metropolis I use recordings of outside sounds from various cities (Valencia, Berlin, Madrid, Vienna...), which interact with the orchestra in collaged form – I am very much concerned with the spatialization of these city sounds throughout the auditorium as well as with their diverse musical relationships to the orchestra. Two different types of compositional logic productively collide here.

The poetic idea underlying the aesthetic exaggeration of more or less random city sounds is based on a short text from the end of Italo Calvino's "The Invisible Cities":

Sometimes a clearing in an immeasurable landscape, a flash of lights in the fog, the dialog of two passers-by meeting in a crowd, is enough for me to imagine that from here I will assemble, piece by piece, the perfect city, built of fragments mixed with the rest, of moments separated by intervals, of signals sent out by one without knowing who receives them. When I tell you that the city to which my journey is dedicated has no continuity in space and time, is sometimes looser and sometimes denser, you must not think that it is possible to stop searching.

In this sense, I imagine a kind of acoustic window from the auditorium into an imaginary city composed of many fragments - into a personal utopian place that, like Calvino, you can't stop looking for. In these times, which suddenly feel dystopian due to the various current crises, the idea of utopia has once again become essential for my survival.

The title Inside metropolis is deliberately ambiguous and refers both to the city sounds inside the concert hall and to this inner utopian place.