Printemps has been performed in Amiens, Antwerp, Barcelona, Beijing, Belo Horizonte, Berlin, Bogotá, Bordeaux, Bowling Green, Brussels, Búger, Cambridge, Denton, Évora, Florence, Karlsruhe, Kyiv, La Monnerie-le-Montel, La Spezia, Lisbon, Liverpool, London, Malmö, Monaco, Montpellier, Nice, Paris, Pristina, Rome, Saint-Étienne, San Francisco, São Paulo, Vienna, Vorst and Wrocław…

Spring is channelled through a sequence of three haikus: Jeux d’oiseaux [Bird Games], Jeux d’eau [Water Games], Jeux d’enfants [Children’s Games]. These tableaux put side by side snippets of the classical repertoire — shakuhachi, Olivier Messiaen, R Murray Schafer, Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy — and composed sonic landscapes.

Dear Annette,

To assemble iridescences as fleeting as fundamental particles (cohobated in your electronic still with much patience and desire), to compose sonic spurts out of those scattered myriads, to bring forth new theories out of their fulguration, and to let whoever listens to them completely free to chase their light — while listening to your Haïkus, I was left unsure whether I were in a concert hall or at the CERN witnessing an experience that was pushing the limits of physics or an event at the frontiers of music.

What you stretched out in front of our eyes was not a corny saccharine springtime, but the sacred crescendo of lively mornings, decisive beginnings where sap shoots up vigorously so that summer may come, when the opening of the most delicate of buds is imbued with imperative absolute — may Life outlive the winter of oblivion.

I perceived more than trite landscapes, I perceived a concertante power; more than descriptions, a sum; more than vignettes, something green and fresh. And in that regard your work comes closer to poetry: it does not, under the naked notes, like with naked words, present facts: it invokes valences, it convenes values, it entreats freedom.

May that springtime come!

— Miguel Mesquita da Cunha, Grand-Leez (Gembloux), on this Europe Day of 2017

— Annette Vande Gorne [English translation: François Couture, viii-20]

Printemps [Spring] was realized in 2016 at the Métamorphoses d’Orphée studio of Musiques & Recherches in Ohain (Belgium) and premiered on November 9, 2016 during the Hors-les-murs: Haïkusmatique concert as part of the Ars Musica festival in the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in Paris (France).