Sonic Tonic
17 March 2011 • 8 pm • Scotia Dance Centre (677 Davie Street), Vancouver, Canada
Solo recital. North American premiere of Ana-Maria Avram’s “Musique pour Mallarmé.” Also “Canto Ostinato” by Simeon ten Holt and “à r.” by Iannis Xenakis.
More info: Vancouver New Music
Programme notes »
Ana-Maria Avram (1961-) -- Musique pour Mallarmé (1985) 12min
Simeon ten Holt (1923-) -- Canto Ostinato for piano solo (1979) approx. 50min
Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) – à r. (Homage à Ravel) (1987) 3min
The three works on tonight’s programme differ greatly, yet have something in common – all three were composed in Europe in the late ‘70s-‘80s; postmodern in spirit, each one of them “reacts to” or, “counteracts” modernism in a different way:
Ana-Maria Avram (born Romania, 1961), a leading figure of European avant-garde classical music, was educated in Romania and France; building on the ideas of spectralism, she has characterized her music as acousmatic, heterophonic, transformational. In Musique pour Mallarmé the audience’s attention is drawn to the piano’s string- and percussive nature. Unusual and fascinating sound effects are achieved without the use of any preparation or electronics.
Ever since its premiere in 1979, Simeon ten Holt’s (born Holland, 1923) Canto Ostinato has enjoyed the status of something of a cult piece in Western Europe. An example of early European minimalism, with the potential to be performed on four, two, or just one piano and to last anything between 40 and 180 minutes, here is what its creator says: "Canto Ostinato for keyboard instruments was completed in 1976, was tonal, and perhaps, as an unruly phenomenon, needed three years of reconcilement... The assumption of the-longer-the better is a mistake if the tension between two moments in time fails and what sounds is nothing more than pointless repetition of the same... "
Composed in 1987, à r. (Homage à Maurice Ravel, Xenakis’ last piano solo work) was commissioned by Radio France to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Ravel's death. Tonight, it marks the 10th anniversary of Xenakis’ own departing. At twenty-one measures and just over two minutes in duration, it is one of the most concentrated of Xenakis' works. Extremely virtuosic and demanding, the piece presents an unusual challenge to the performer: derived from the graphic representations of stochastic waveforms, the so-called non-octave scales (scales in which each octave contains different pitches) run independently in different directions in both hands, intercepted by harmoniously-dissonant chords, long-held or fast-repeated.
— T.D., February 02, 2011
