Date of composition: 2002
Premiere: 7 November 2003 in the Herkulessaal of the Residenz Munich by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, conductor: Udo Zimmermann
Duration: 13 minutes
Performances by the Berliner Philharmoniker:
on 17 September 2025 at the Berlin Philharmonic under the baton of Kirill Petrenko
“I value Pascal Dusapin because he is proud, curious, independent, and intellectually well organised.” These words by the composer Iannis Xenakis have proven prophetic: his then-young colleague has long since become one of the most influential voices in contemporary music, both in Europe and worldwide. This is evident in the work performed today, dedicated to the memory of Xenakis; it is the fifth of Dusapin’s seven compositions entitled Solo for Orchestra. Its Latin title is Exeo, in English: “I go out” – and therein lies the unforeseen. Dusapin awakens dormant forces within the symphony orchestra, “mighty and beautiful” (Kirill Petrenko). The French composer is no stranger to the Berliner Philharmoniker; the orchestra premiered Reverso, the sixth Solo for Orchestra, at the opening of the Grand Théâtre in Aix-en-Provence.
Born in Nancy in 1955, Pascal Dusapin initially studied fine arts and art history; the encounter with the sound worlds of Edgar Varèse inspired him to turn to musicology. As a composer, he studied with prominent figures: alongside Iannis Xenakis – who described him as his only true pupil – he was also a student of Olivier Messiaen and Franco Donatoni. A scholarship at the Villa Medici of the Académie de France in Rome further broadened his horizons. Today, Pascal Dusapin’s oeuvre encompasses more than one hundred works in virtually every genre. In his operas, he engages with renowned subjects such as Faust, Orpheus, Penthesilea, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, or the Passion story. Dusapin’s Soli for the orchestra – treated as a “grand solo instrument” – arose from his desire to escape the “constraint of performance durations between ten and twenty minutes, which inevitably accompanied commissioned works. … I dreamt of an extended, complex form made up of seven independent episodes.” These episodes are interwoven with countless cross-references to one another and to the rest of his oeuvre. Begun in 1991 with Go, the cycle was completed in 2009 with Uncut. In Exeo (2002), Dusapin explores “the sensation of the loss of sonic balance”: what does it feel like when the ear loses all orientation? Dusapin himself speaks of music that engulfs us like a giant wave until we finally regain equilibrium. To this end, he deploys the large orchestra mainly in the lowest and highest registers, largely eschewing the middle range. The individual voices combine to form an organism that breathes and pulses, in which single tones well up and fade away, intervallic figures emerge and sink back.