Où allons nous?

15 min

May 14, 2008
Montreal, QC, Canada
The Ensemble Contemporain de Montreal
Véronique Lacroix, music director
Jonathan Crow, violin

Commissioned by Véronique Lacroix for violinist Jonathan Crow and the Ensemble Contemporain

violin solo-2.1.1.1-1.1.1.0-perc(2)-strings

Où allons-nous?, a concerto for violin and chamber orchestra, was commissioned by Véronique Lacroix for violinist Jonathan Crow and the Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal in 2008. It was premiered on an evening entitled “Les Marquises”, the name both a reference to the French Polynesian islands that became the home of Paul Gauguin, and a nod to the program of the evening, which featured four prominent women. Framed by fragments of Charles Ives’s enigmatic work, The Unanswered Question, each composer took as her impetus one of the three questions in the title of Gauguin’s masterpiece, D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?

–Luna Pearl Woolf