[08/06/2024 | 16:00] Lisboa: Reinhold Friedl meets ZARMensemble, Casa do Comum

ZARMensemble is an award-winning string quartet started by Carlos “Zíngaro” (violin), David Magalhães Alves (violin), Ulrich Mitzlaff (cello) and Alvaro Rosso (double bass).

The ZARMensemble has given several performances, including at Galeria Monumental, Lisbon (2018); at the MIA festival, Atouguia da Baleia (2019); at Faroeste EMCII, Caldas da Rainha (2021); at the IndieLisboa festival at Culturgest - Caixa Geral de Depósitos, Lisbon (2022); at Ciclo de Polinização, Paredes de Coura (2022). The quartet was also part of the “Renova” project, led by musician Carlos Zíngaro and choreographer Paula Pinto, winner of the “Renova Art Commissions” (RAC) in 2021, curated by Martim Sousa Tavares. Video Dance Film: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hz_YRILWBY - the 3rd part with ZARMensemble starts at 41:30).

Based on a compulsive fascination with sound, the overwhelming resonance of large acoustic spaces, and the subtleties of “false emptiness”, the quartet explores the extraordinary sonorities characteristic of strings and wood as a collective sound body of constant vibrations, felt in their reflected silences. A different kind of string quartet that sacralizes the profane or profanes the sacred.

The members of ZARMensemble understand themselves as constant travelers, living between here and there, while perpetually searching for affirmations of experimentation through oscillating interactions and collaborations in the world of sounds. The pieces mean for the quartet a game of various hypotheses with different exploratory conceptions that appear in the speeches and are constantly affirmed as unexpected sonic surprises. The quartet's focus is the game of risk or the risk of that same game: the fascination of creation and its transformation; the amazement at another form of musical expression: the potential of surprise in the face of the unexpected - it's the undetermined.

Not only does the classical tradition “dictate” that the string quartet always have a viola, but not a double bass in its composition, but often, because of this same tradition, aleatory will rarely have any presence in the structuring of the compositional logic in its traditional exposition of this formation. Trying to avoid “illustrating” languages or idioms, the ZARMensemble's compositions will always be subject to changes in the moment, to spaces and silences that are casually contradictory and often unexpected. From Bach to Bartók or from Cage to Lachenmann. The vast exploratory dimension of the ZARMensemble's music is limitless.

https://soundcloud.com/zarmensemble
https://soundcloud.com/zarmensemble/jetsam
https://youtu.be/Z-2f_gAJhrE?feature=shared
https://youtu.be/7Fy6X5S_9ck?feature=shared

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