The world premiere of Fabien Waksman's A Dream for Artémis - Fantaisie lunaire will be recorded by the Orchestre Victor Hugo and the Quatuor Ellipsos and sent to the Moon as part of NASA's Artemis program.
"Describing who we are, what we know and what we do" is the mission set by the members of Sanctuary of the Moon, a group of international scientists, researchers, designers and artists founded by Burgundy engineer Benoit Faiveley. Their project: to deposit on the Moon a time capsule named Sanctuary containing information about our humanity in the form of ultra-hard sapphire discs, on which human knowledge from the arts and sciences will be engraved. Described as "a legacy for our descendants in the very distant future, an artifact that will preserve precious information for millions of years to come, a symbolic testimony, a philosophical and anthropological odyssey", the Sanctuary project will contain human genomes, discoveries, academic facts and even... music.
Project members include astrophysicist Jean-Philippe Uzan, who has been working with composer Fabien Waksman, himself a cosmology enthusiast, since 2015. Together, they imagined the piano quintet Le Baiser de la mort, telling the story of two stars revolving around each other until they form a black hole, and Hawkings Songs, 9 songs written in tribute to Stephen Hawking. When the Ellipsos saxophone quartet commissioned Fabien Waksman to write a new work to celebrate the group's 20th anniversary, it was only natural that the composer should reconnect with his astrophysicist friend to imagine A Dream for Artemis, a concerto for saxophone quartet and orchestra, conceived as a tribute to the conquest of space from Apollo 11 to the future Artemis III Mission.
To perform this lunar fantasy, the Quatuor Ellipsos called on the Orchestre Victor Hugo, and together they will perform this work on January 11, 2025 at Micropolis Besançon and on January 12 at the Axone in Montbéliard, during the Orchestra's traditional New Year's concert, this year entitled " Les Rythmes de la Terre ". The story doesn't end there, however, as this work will then be recorded on sapphire disc for inclusion in the Sanctuary capsule, which will be sent to the Moon's surface by an automated space probe under the CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) contract with NASA.
"The Apollo program took twelve men to the Moon. With Sanctuary, the Artemis program will take all of humanity there. And then some."
Further information at Sanctuary of the Moon website