«Pulau Dewata» by Claude Vivier

Claude Vivier's work Pulau Dewata is most certainly one of this composer's most often playted. Because of its conception, allowing many different types of instrumental ensembles to play it, a wide variety of recordings and versions with different orchestrations can be found.

Premiered by McGill Percussion Ensemble's 9 players in the seventies, under the direction of Pierre Béluse, a version often considered as the "official" one, the orchestration performed by Sixtrum was this time done by percussionist Fabrice Marandola. Fabrice has actually written 3 versions of Pulau, one for voice and percussion, a second one for 12 percussionists (which was performed on tour by Sixtrum and 6 french percussionists), and finally, this one, that will be performed during the Conseil des arts de Montréal tour this year, in a Sixtrum concert titled Pléiades.

This version was also recorded by Sixtrum for a CD that should be out in late 2011.

In this video, Fabrice Marandola explains us how he became interested in Pulau Dewata, and how he approached his orchestration work for the piece. During the video, Fabrice will mention an article he wrote on the other existing orchestrations of Pulau Dewata. The article, published in Circuits, can be found at here. You will see in the video that Fabrice took a different approach to orchestrating Pulau compared to most of his predecessors.

The video was recorded August 17 2010 in my office at Université de Montréal, which is also used as a storing room for Sixtrum, as you will notice...

I have also included an audio excerpt of the piece performed by Sixtrum.