Raphaël Cendo

Saturday 3 October 2020, 8:00 pm
Arsenale, Teatro alle Tese

La Biennale di Venezia has attributed the Silver Lion to the French composer Raphaël Cendo, born in 1975, the founder of the aesthetic movement, “Saturationism”, which has revolutionized the way of conceiving and composing music and attracted many young composers.

“The Silver Lion for an emerging talent is an acknowledgment to the genius of a composer who has “invented” a new and extreme way of conceiving and even listening to music: Raphaël Cendo. Founder of the “Saturation” movement, the young artist has revolutionized a way of conceiving and composing sound that has attracted the attention of a vast audience and of many very young composers who have looked to him as their model. Author of the famous pamphlet “Ars satura”, the artist grounds the roots of his aesthetic in the archetypes of the various artistic disciplines, in which “meaning” is channeled by a complex “signifier” that articulates precision in composition and freedom of interpretation within a context of fluid balance that forgoes any presumption of absolute definition and univocal rendering of the acoustic fact”.
Ivan Fedele

Raphaël Cendo will present the Italian premiere of Delocazione, a piece composed in 2017 to a mosaic of texts by Claude Royet-Journoud, Georges Didi-Huberman, Rainer-Marie Rilke, and Georges Bataille, featuring the French Tana Quartet and the specialists in contemporary vocal music, the Neue Vocalsolisten. The concert is scheduled on 3 October (Arsenale, Teatro alle Tese) on the occasion of the Silver Lion award ceremony.

Raphaël Cendo (France, 1975) studied piano and composition at the École normale de musique in Paris, from which he graduated in 2000. He participated in the composition class at the Conservatoire national supérieur de Paris in 2003, then attended the Cursus annuel de composition e d’informatique musicale at Ircam, which he completed in 2006. His professors included Allain Gaussin, Brian Ferneyhough, Fausto Romitelli and Philippe Manoury.
Along with other composers such as Franck Bedrossian, he developed the concept of instrumental saturation. He has written works for internationally renowned ensembles such as L'Itinéraire, the Orchestre national d'Ile de France, the Quatuor Diotima, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ictus, Cairn, musikFabrik, the Alternance ensemble, the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Les Percussions de Strasbourg, the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, the Munich Radio Orchestra, which have been conducted by Miquel Bernat, Alain Billard, Daniel Kawka, Jean Deroyer, Pascal Rophé, Guillaume Bourgogne, Peter Rundel, Georges-Élie Octors and Lorraine Vaillancourt. His compositions have been performed in important events such as «Lille, Capitale européenne de la culture», the Opéra di Lille, the Tremplin concerts at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Mito Festival in Milan, La Biennale di Venezia, Radio France in Montpellier, Voix Nouvelles in Royaumont, Présences de Radio France, Musica a Strasburgo, Ars Musica in Brussels, Why Note in Dijon and in Germany, Darmstadt and Donaueschingen.
In 2007 Raphaël Cendo won the Prix Espoir awarded by the Fondation Francis et Mica Salabert, at the Concours international de composition de l’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. In 2008 he taught composition at the Conservatory in Nanterre. He graduated from the Conservatoire national supérieur de Paris in composition, analysis and orchestration. From 2009 to 2011 he was the composer-in-residence at Villa Médicis, Académie de France in Rome. In 2012, he was a guest professor at the summer courses in Darmstadt and at the composition sessions of Voix Nouvelles at Royaumont. In 2009 he won the Prix Pierre Cardin at the Académie des Beaux-Arts and in 2011 the Prix Hervé Dugardin of SACEM.
His piece Graphein for ensemble (2014) is, in his opinion, “the synthesis of ten years of research on complex sounds”, an expression he uses for multiphonic sounds which – in his eyes – create “colours” and not simple series of notes. Raphaël Cendo is the director of the Université d’Altitude.