L'Instant Donne - Cherche Titre: Music By Mikel Urquiza

Acclaimed ensemble L'Instant Donne presents 'Cherche titre', an album of world-premiere recordings of music by Spanish composer Mikel Urquiza, who just received the Composers' Prize 2022 of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. Full of verve and sparkle, Mikel Urquiza's music delicately flirts with burlesque, twists melodies and toys with clich�s, a playfulness well suited to this ensemble.

Mikel Urquiza studied composition with fellow Odradek artist Ramon Lazkano; in 2019, Urquiza was sponsored by the Peter Eotvos Contemporary Music Foundation and in 2020 became resident of the Academie de France in Rome � Villa Medicis. Working without a conductor, L'Instant Donne was founded in 2002 and is located in Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis), Paris, in a vast studio equipped with an extensive range of instruments.

The scores drawn together on this album brim with joyful musical tricks and discoveries, teeming with incongruous gestures that create a sense of amusement ingeniously governed by a coherent system of rules. Mikel Urquiza's music takes shape with great definition of timbre and an extreme precision of narrative, phrasing and rhythmic accuracy.

As L'Instant Donne put it in the album booklet, this music demands that they find a common alchemy � a mixture of rigour and fantasy, constraint and flexibility � to transcend the rules of the game in order to give body and life to this alert, mischievous, sometimes strange music which owes nothing to chance. And this is precisely what drives us at L'Instant Donne: finding common breath in music. Mikel Urquiza understands this perfectly and offers us scores that fully exploit the potential of our ensemble.