World-renowned Danish percussionists Mathias Reumert and Anders Elten have teamed up with trailblazing composer, Philippe Manoury. The fruit of a multi-year collaboration, this album features world-première recordings of Manoury’s work.

“Argumenta synthesizes, in a way, all my previous compositions for keyboard percussion. Written for the outstanding Reumert/Elten Percussion Duo (who perform my works from memory!), Argumenta incorporates many of the techniques and ideas I had experimented with in previous works.

“The title ‘Argumenta’ is quite abstract but implicitly evokes a kind of joust or conversation in which the two musicians exchange ideas and proposals that will serve as a basis for confrontations. Sometimes the two protagonists ‘talk’ about the same thing in the same voice; sometimes they continue to talk about the same thing, but in more individual ways, and sometimes they oppose, pursue, interrupt, or influence each other.

“The marimba is a simple instrument: tuned wooden bars amplified by tube resonators. One would think that it wasn’t possible to create a legato phrasing with this construction. However, the virtuosity of today’s marimbists has transcended the limitations of the instrument. This extraordinary development has allowed me to articulate musical ideas that I previously wouldn’t have considered realizable. I am fighting against the fact that the marimba is a simple construction!”

– Philippe Manoury

Reumert and Elten also present Le Tombeau de Couperin in an exciting new version. Maurice Ravel’s masterful hybrid – true to Baroque forms but unmistakably Ravel – was written for solo piano and then orchestrated by the composer. These adaptations, in turn, inspired Mathias Reumert to transcribe the suite for keyboard percussion instruments.