Novarumori, an exploratory ensemble project founded by Isak Goldschneider, performs Maxim Shalygin’s Angel  and Olivier Alary’s Vestiges – meditations between past and present reimagining musical traditions for a complex, uncertain era.

Maxim Shalygin’s Angel (2020) is a reflection born from the global upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic. Composed during – and preceding – a time of widespread trauma, it questions humanity’s relationship with nature and the fragility of existence.

Shalygin, a Ukrainian-Dutch composer born in Kamianske in 1985, has established himself as a significant voice in contemporary classical music. After studies in Ukraine and Russia, he moved to the Netherlands in 2010, where he has since composed over 40 works spanning various genres, including chamber, vocal, symphonic, and electroacoustic music, as well as scores for theatre, ballet, and film. Violinist Adrianne Munden-Dixon and cellist Audreanne Filion will perform the Quebec premiere of this poignant work.

Angel draws inspiration from Maurice Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello, composed a century earlier in the aftermath of World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic. Like Ravel, Shalygin employs melody as a central expressive force.

Dedicated to the late Georgian composer Giya Kancheli, Angel urges a reevaluation of our connection to the natural world and each other in the face of global crises.

Olivier Alary — Vestiges

Vestiges is a haunting, immersive sonic meditation by Montreal-based composer Olivier Alary. Scored for twelve amplified lap steel guitars and electronic diffusion, the 42-minute work is the culmination of over a decade of artistic inquiry. Hovering between memory and oblivion, it evokes a spectral vocality—a ghostly choir of echoes and reverberations.

Each guitar, played using extended and unconventional techniques, becomes a conduit for fragments of sound, like traces of forgotten voices. These fragments, emotionally charged and ephemeral, resurface like memories half-remembered: vivid in part, obscured in whole. The music unfolds slowly, its textures unfolding with an uncanny slowness suspended in time.

Though instrumental, Vestiges is profoundly shaped by vocal traditions. Drawing on the structural principles of madrigals, Orthodox liturgy, Gaelic psalmody, and chorales, Alary constructs a sonic architecture rooted in the past while resisting nostalgia. Polyphonic complexity, drones, harmonic verticality, and chaotic overlays form the piece’s backbone, in an unmistakably contemporary sonic landscape rich with spectral shimmer and spatial nuance.

Born in France and based in Montreal, Olivier Alary is a versatile composer whose work spans albums, film scores, dance, and sound installations. With formal training in architecture, sound arts, and instrumental composition, he crafts music that dissolves the boundaries between experimental, popular, and contemporary forms. His practice integrates acoustic and electronic elements into dense, emotionally resonant sound worlds shaped by influences ranging from noise and baroque to post-minimalism. Alary has collaborated with artists such as Björk, Nick Knight, Cat Power, and Doug Aitken, and has released work on labels including Rephlex, Fatcat Records, 130701, and LINE. He has also composed the music for over fifty films, many of which have been recognized at major festivals including Cannes, Sundance, and Venice. 


Vestiges extends his ongoing exploration of form, memory, and sonic space through a richly textured, rigorously constructed sound world.

VESTIGES  – performed by

Jonathan Barriault :: Nicolas Caloia :: Steven Cowan :: Simon Duchesne :: Ben Grossman :: Marc-André Labelle :: Dominic Marion :: Pierre-Yves Martel :: Matt Murphy :: Jean René :: Pascal Richard :: Julien Sandiford – lap steel guitars

Isak Goldschneider, musical direction

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Image: Gregor Chatonsky

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We would like to thank the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, and the SOCAN Foundation for their support.