His early works are marked by dense, turbulent sound-masses and extreme textural pressure, occasionally relieved by flashes of a signature French orchestral color. Later pieces show a greater openness to tonal implication without any loss of formal rigor. Theater — more precisely, conversation — stands at the core of his aesthetic: music conceived as heightened speech, grounded in primal exchanges where intonation precedes language. His mature stage and orchestral works fuse ecstatic expansion with volatility and latent violence, while elsewhere ferocious, free jazz-like energy is held in meticulous control.

Across genres, Dusapin has pursued a strictly individual system, resistant to schools and labels, favoring instability and the refusal of what he once called “well-rounded solutions”. This severity, tinged with a Beckett-like sense of paradox and an austere, sometimes mordant wit, underpins a worldview in which clarity and absurdity coexist. As he himself remarked: “I make music while awaiting death like you, like everyone here in the world: we’re all waiting to die.”

The program presents two works by Dusapin. Khôra (1993), originally written for a large string orchestra and later revised in a version for 30 strings, takes its title from Plato’s notion of χώρα: a formless receptacle, an interval or space that “gives place” to being between two realms, the intelligible and the sensible. It is paired with Flying River, a Violin Concerto receiving its world premiere, composed on commission from the Fondation Louis Vuitton.

Also featured are two works by Giacinto Scelsi, a highly singular figure whose radical concentration on sound as a living substance exerted a lasting influence on a generation of French composers, including Dusapin. Anahit (1965), Scelsi’s most frequently performed and recorded composition, is a single-movement violin concerto. The title refers to the Armenian pagan goddess of love; the solo violin, written on four staves and tuned to a scordatura centered around G, is set against an orchestral background shaped by subtle pitch deviations and restrained dynamic growth. Pranam I (1972), for ensemble, contralto, and tape, takes its name from a traditional Indian gesture of greeting and was composed in memory of the Greek composer Jani Christou and his wife, who died in a car accident; the work is marked by ritual stasis and extreme control of microtonal oscillation.

Arvo Pärt’s Psalom (1985) opens the concert. This concise work for string orchestra is rooted in the composer’s tintinnabuli technique and based on Psalm 112 (113) in Church Slavonic, translating textual structure into a sequence of melodic sentences shaped by stressed and unstressed syllables and separated by silences. Its austere, ritual character and carefully regulated melodic material exemplify Pärt’s reduction of compositional means in the service of clarity and spiritual focus.