Program Fira B! 2021

The Balearic Islands Symphony Orchestra is committed to the challenge of expanding its repertoire beyond the traditional symphonic. Through groups of musicians from the musical ensemble "Ensemble Illes Sonores", contemporary pieces from the 21st century will be performed and will also cover their relationships and influences with the 20th century.

For Fira B! 2021, the Ensemble Illes Sonores will perform Metropolis, music for the film by Fritz Lang, directed by the same composer Martin Matalon. His work on Métropolis, by Fritz Lang, prompts him to reflect on the overlap of narrative time, visual rhythm and musical agogic. 

Martin Matalon was born in Buenos Aires in 1958, studied at the Juilliard School of Music in New York where he obtained a Masters in composition. From 1989 to 1996, he founded and is the music director of the New York-based Music Mobile ensemble dedicated to contemporary repertoire. In 2005 he received an award from the J.S Guggenheim Foundation in New York and an award from the Institut de France Académie des Beaux-Arts. In 2001, the prize of the city of Barcelona for the Music of Metropolis and the Charles Ives Scholarship of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1989 the “Opera Autrement” prize from the Acanthes Center for the production of the chamber opera “The Secret Miracle” based on the eponymous story by J.L. Borges.

In 1993, he settled permanently in Paris, IRCAM commissioned the music for the newly restored version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. After this considerable work, Martin Matalon immerses himself in the universe of Luis Buñuel and writes three new scores in a row for the three surrealist films of the Aragonese filmmaker he made between 1927 and 1932. His catalog includes a large number of works of chamber and orchestra.