Made up of instrumentalists from different geographies and artistic contexts, the performers of Arxis Ensemble have one thing in common: having devoted an important part of their training to specialize in contemporary music in different European nerve centers of the current scene. For this reason, they base their activity on a constant flow of exchange with young composers at international level, as well as contact with various aesthetics and artistic manifestations, ranging from the interdisciplinary and performative to the purely instrumental, always reinterpreted from their own perspective and framed in the present.
Having trained with some of the most outstanding contemporary performers in Europe and living the first years of their professional career in the midst of a generational change between the great creators of the second half of the twentieth century and the most recent trends, the musicians of Arxis believe in the importance of building bridges between both centuries: on the one hand with the intention of achieving excellence in instrumental performance, absorbing the techniques and sound experimentation of the last decades in order to arm themselves with resources to interact with the present, on the other hand with the aim of bringing sustainability to the current scene, providing great compositions of past decades, already incorporated into the great repertoire, with a new life or interpretative development prolonged in time.
During its first season, Arxis Ensemble had Aitor Vázquez Torres as guest conductor, and Igor C Silva as resident composer. During this first cycle of concerts, it carried out several activities and concerts around the centenary of the birth of Iannis Xenakis, which reached its climax with the performance of the percussion sextet “Pléïades” within the the V RESIS Festival of Contemporary Music.
Arxis Ensemble has also been conducted by Beat Furrer, with whom it performed the Spanish premiere of the work “Akusmata”, by Furrer himself. This performance took place in collaboration with the Austrian vocal ensemble Cantando Admont.
In 2023, the ensemble participated in the 6th edition of the RESIS Festival and the 45th edition of the ENSEMS Festival, premiering works by Claudia Cañamero and Hugo Gómez-Chao. It also performed the Spanish premiere of “La lumière du noir”, by Alberto Posadas. All this under the direction of Nacho de Paz.
