Through the Looking Glass
31 January 2009 • Alix Goolden Hall, Victoria
Solo concert, part of Victoria Symphony’s New Currents Music Festival. Music by György Ligeti, Galina Ustvolskaya, Philip Glass, Jonathan Harvey and Tzenka Dianova.
Tzenka Dianova — Through the Looking Glass (2009, world premiere)
This short piece for 'inside piano' and tape is a respectful tribute to John Cage and his revolutionary "Imaginary Landscape 1," written and premiered exactly 70 years ago. When asked about the meaning of 'imaginary,' Cage said: 'It’s not a physical landscape. It’s a term reserved for the new technologies. It’s a landscape of the future. It’s as though you used technology to take you off the ground and go like Alice through the looking glass.'
Gyorgy Ligeti — Musica Richercata, complete (1953, Victoria premiere)
Ligeti’s first large cycle for the piano was written as an 'experiment to create new music from nothing.' What the composer humorously referred to as 'nothing' was his use of minimal structures and pitch material to create a large-scale work.
The cycle is made up of eleven short pieces, where the first explores a single pitch, with a second added at the very end. The second piece is built around three pitches, the third around four, and so on, until the eleventh piece, which utilizes all twelve pitches. In a 'micro-macrocosmic' manner, each movement creates a powerful and lasting atmosphere of its own — whether it is intensely rhythmic dance, macabre ceremony, child’s-play tune, 'pastoral,' barrel organ tune, church chant, 'organ' fugue etc. — to fit with the rest in a perfect unity.
Galina Ustvol'skaya — Sonata 5 (1986)
The music of Ustvol’skaya defies categorization. Galina Ivanovna herself implored those who love her music to refrain from analyzing it. "Piano Sonata 5" (1988) is her penultimate piano composition; the only works that came after it were "Sonata 6" and the last Symphony, presciently entitled “Amen”; after that Ustvolskaya ceased composing.
Philip Glass — Mad Rush (1981)
"Mad Rush" was written for the occasion of the Dalai Lama's first public address in New York City, in the fall of 1981. Originally an open-structured or open-ended piece, it was first performed by Glass on organ during the Dalai Lama's entrance into the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
Jonathan Harvey — Tombeau de Messiaen (1994, Victoria premiere)
"Tombeau de Messiaen" is, in the composer’s words, 'a modest offering in response to the death of a great musical and spiritual presence.' Harvey continues, 'Messiaen was a protospectralist, that is to say, he was fascinated by the colors of the harmonic series and its distortions, and found therein a prismatic play of light. The tape part of my work is composed of piano sounds entirely tuned to harmonic series — twelve of them, one for each class of pitch. The 'tempered' live piano joins and distorts these series, never entirely belonging, never entirely separate.'
© 2009 Tzenka Dianova. Use by permission only.
