In Seville, the Trans Europe Express project celebrates women composers
| April 20, 2026 | DIAPASON |
Offering concerts, masterclasses and workshops, conferences and outreach activities, the international project combines repertoire with commissioned works by women composers from the four participating countries: France, Hungary, Malta and Spain. During the Seville stop, several standout pieces by Szigetvári and Mulsant were featured.
Two main highlights closed the Seville chapter of the Trans Europe Express project led by violinist Agnès Pyka. The first—a conference aimed at repositioning women composers within their historical and geographical contexts—brought three of the featured figures to speak about their artistic paths. French composer Florentine Mulsant revisited key moments in the history of women composers at the Paris Conservatoire. Polish composer Anna Małek discussed her own trajectory between Poland, Austria, and Spain, where she now lives. Hungarian composer Andrea Szigetvári chose instead a short participatory performance with the audience (young masterclass participants and conservatory students), vividly illustrating some of her compositional gestures. The brief concert that followed presented movements from string trios by Véronique Vella—whose highly structured writing combines counterpoint and echoes of dance—and Jean Cras, as each concert pairs contemporary creation with repertoire works.
Winter Light
The same Cras trio opened the evening concert, the final stage of this Spanish stop. Oscillating between modality and tonality, the score abounds in short thematic motifs presented in various ways but never fully developed, giving the impression of a somewhat loose architecture. The finale, however, stood out, particularly in the hands of the performers (Agnès Pyka, violin; Jean Sautereau, viola; Jordan Costard, cello).
The quintet The Weight of Winter Light by Spanish composer Marian Márquez adds flautist Alfonso Rubio Marco and clarinettist Antonio Salguero to the trio. Inspired by an Emily Dickinson poem, it aims to translate winter light into music across four movements corresponding to each quatrain of the text. There’s a Certain Slant of Light unfolds as suspended time, punctuated here and there by brief woodwind chirps; it is followed by the darker Refractions, then an inward-looking Seal of Despair, using a plaintive semitone before the final dissolution of No Scar Remains, which gradually fades into a spiralling sonic texture of insistent repeated notes. Despite its pictorial qualities, the work feels somewhat unfinished.
Mastery of form
Florentine Mulsant is a composer of both structure and substance: her Sonata No. 5 for solo violin (2024) is a striking example, and Agnès Pyka approaches its three movements with precision, rigour and energy. A prelude based on the instrument’s open strings, gradually enriched with tremolos and string crossings, is followed by a theme and six variations. Its plaintive melody thickens progressively toward a final illumination. Fast and repetitive, the finale takes on the character of a dance, a virtuosic perpetuum mobile that brings back, in a final nod, the opening motif of the prelude.
A similar sense of architecture defines Andrea Szigetvári’s exceptional string trio and electronics work Harmoniques perturbées. Four foundational Assises, blending instruments and electronics in a striking way (the last one being improvised in real time by the trio), alternate with three more evocative movements: Liturgie de Bois evokes, through cracking and dry sounds, the noise of church pews from which a cello line emerges; crushed sounds, pizzicatos and swirling textures depict Fracas et sillage, while Déséquilibres intensifies the relay-like gestures between instruments and electronics before a gradual return to calm.
The next Trans Europe Express edition is already under discussion and could expand both geographically and in human terms. Long may it continue.
Seville, Francisco Guerrero Conservatory and CICUS Auditorium, April 17.
By Anne Ibos-Augé