Music from a different planet. This is the feeling that has always taken over me when listening to the Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and John Cage. Music from an invisible, distant, and mysterious world. The works of these composers do not resemble in any way those of their contemporaries: is it, perhaps, because the two men were not composers, but in fact, inventors? Inventors of sounds, magicians of rhythm, creators of new languages, that had never been heard before. As true visionaries, ahead of their time, they treated the Sonata not as a rigid and extensive form, but rather as a miraculous space designed for conception and experimentation. More than two hundred years separate the two composers, but their Sonatas seem so much alike: short, provocative, passionate, full of wild colours, and bursting with sensual rhythms. Light years away from the traditional Sonata that ruled during the two centuries that went by between Scarlatti and Cage, the two artists treated this form as a free, agile and dazzling entity: like an Unidentified Flying Object, passing in the sky, brief, remote and solitary. Searching in their feverish imagination, Scarlatti and Cage conceived these pieces to be the messengers of a yet unknown world. Embracing the future and its freedoms, the Sonatas seem to be staring at us from their far, distant planet. (David Greilsammer)

Flagey