To mark its 20th anniversary, the Ellipsos Quartet commissioned a work from the composer Fabien WAKSMAN and Jean-Philippe UZAN. This collaboration gave birth to A Dream for Artemis.
Premiered in 2023 at the La Roque d’Anthéron festival and the Nice ClassicFestival, A Dream for Artemis was first performed with the pianist Marie-Josèphe JUDE. Since then, the work has traveled around the world: Warsaw, Tokyo, Chicago, Montreal, in different versions: orchestra, piano quintet, saxophone quartet and string trio.
A Dream for Artemis, From the Earth to the Moon is a documentary film directed by Victor CESCA. It traces the human, musical and scientific adventure of the Ellipsos Quartet around a unique symphonic work dedicated to the conquest of space. The work at the heart of the film is a cosmic and poetic fantasy, composed by Fabien WAKSMAN to texts by Jean-Philippe UZAN. It is directly inspired by NASA’s “Artemis” space program, which plans to return humanity to the Moon.
From the conquest of the Moon to the galaxies of Star Wars, this program invites us on a musical journey to the heart of space. From classical works that have marked cinema, such as Also sprach Zarathustra and The Blue Danube, immortalized in 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the epic music of Interstellar and Star Wars, discover how classical music and film music echo each other and feed our dreams of space conquest. A journey between musical heritage, cinema and infinite imagination. With Marie-Josèphe JUDE (piano).
Once upon a time, there was a singular little blue planet, home to a species fascinated by the beauty of the universe that sheltered it. This species always strove to look further, to push back the horizon of the possible and to touch the mystery of its origin. Exploring unknown worlds seemed so vital to it that it forgot to preserve its own habitat. This species, unique and insignificant in the cosmos, full of paradoxes, is ours: Humanity.
A Dream for Artemis is a concerto for saxophone quartet conceived as a tribute to space exploration, from 1957 to the present day.
Suggestions for completing an orchestral concert program with this concerto:
The Planets by Gustav Holst
Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin
From ancient mythology to dreams of space conquest, this program takes us on a journey through the Universe. With The Planets by Gustav Holst, the stars come to life through the features of the deities who gave them their names: the fire of Mars, the gentleness of Venus, the magic of Uranus and the majesty of Jupiter. After this mythological voyage, A Dream for Artemis by Fabien Waksman carries us toward a new adventure: humanity’s return to the Moon. Between ancestral legends and the exploration of the future, music opens a window onto the infinite.