Trajectory of a Connection: Romitelli/Montreal
This investigation, consisting of thoughts and reminiscences from Marie-Annick Béliveau, Julien Bilodeau, Sylvain Pohu, and Lorraine Vaillancourt, with the participation of Jean-François Laporte and Jimmie LeBlanc, draws links between Fausto Romitelli and Montreal’s new music scene. The connection follows an arc that began at Royaumont in 1997, where Marie-Annick Béliveau and the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne (nem), under the direction of Lorraine Vaillancourt, were invited to premiere Lost, a pivotal work in the composer’s oeuvre. Romitelli and Vaillancourt met again in Lyon in 2004, some months before she led the Orchestre Philharmonique de Nice in Audiodrome – Dead City Radio, and then performed Lost again in Montréal, in 2005. In Royaumont and elsewhere, during the early 2000s, Romitelli met many Quebec composers whose work he admired, including Jean-François Laporte and Julien Bilodeau. In 2009, the Codes d’accès production company presented the North American premiere of An Index of Metals, followed in 2012 by the Montreal premiere of the Professor Bad Trip cycle. The testimonies collected regarding these various connections illustrate the force with which Romitelli’s work resolves the difficulties of dichotomies both familiar (popular/highbrow, acoustic/electroacoustic, consonance/dissonance) and more surprising (new generations versus old, metropolis versus backwater).