highlike

TOSHIO IWAI

Piano
Iwai’s Piano — As Image Media (1995), a later sound work, is related to these early interactive experiments. Here the user, seated at the piano, triggers a flow of images that depress the piano’s keys; a consequence of this action releases yet another flight of images. The resulting interactive installation synthesizes two different aesthetics: sounds (simple melodies), images and a mechanical object (the piano) with digital media. A projected score and computer-generated imagery transform the piano into image media, hence the work’s name. Sound is the triumphant component in these works, for it activates and shapes the visual work. But the visual aspect of Iwai’s installations is lovely. His interactive systems appeal to the creative impulses of adults and children alike with their celebration of animation, computer potential, and the joy of sound.07

PHILIP GLASS

فيليب الزجاج
菲利普·格拉斯
פיליפ גלאס
フィリップ·グラス
필립 글래스
Филип Гласс
Einstein On The Beach

ROBERT WILSON
Portrait Trilogy:Einstein; Akhnaten; Gandhi

.
Einstein on the Beach is an opera in four acts (framed and connected by five “knee plays” or intermezzos), scored by Philip Glass and directed by theatrical producer Robert Wilson. The opera eschews traditional narrative in favor of a formalist approach based on structured spaces laid out by Wilson in a series of storyboards. The music was written “in the spring, summer and fall of 1975.”Glass recounts the collaborative process: “I put [Wilson’s notebook of sketches] on the piano and composed each section like a portrait of the drawing before me. The score was begun in the spring of 1975 and completed by the following November, and those drawings were before me all the time.”
full opera

LIN HWAI-MIN

White Water and Dust
White Water and Dust, a rare double bill by the internationally renowned choreographer Lin Hwai-min, brings great intensity of contrast between the two works. While White Water, set to piano music by Erik Satie, flows like a movable celebration of life, Dust, to a powerful rendering of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8, evokes a memory of Goya’s Black Paintings.

Stephen Scott

Bowed Piano
Few chamber groups deploy their musicians as oddly as the Bowed Piano Ensemble. The 10 players, students led by the composer Stephen Scott, stand around, and sometimes under, a concert grand, armed with items of all kinds — nylon fishing line, piano hammers, guitar picks, strips of paper, rolls of plumber’s tape — and reach into the instrument to draw sounds from its strings.

Kid Koala and K.K. Barret

NUFONIA MUST FALL
Kid Koala’s celebrated “live animated graphic novel”. Directed by oscar-nominated production designer K.K. Barrett (Her, Lost In Translation, Being John Malkovich). Performed, filmed, edited and scored in real time by a team of 15 performers including puppeteers, cinematographers, a string quartet and Kid Koala on piano/turntables. A romantic story about a robot on the verge of obsolescence.

alfred schnittke

a far cry
concerto grosso no 1
V. Rondo: Agitato
Alfred Schnittke’s haunting first Concerto Grosso for 2 violins, harpsichord, prepared piano and 21 strings,
violinists; Nelson Lee & Meg Freivoge
harpsichord & prepared piano: Andrus Madsen

.

“It’s a piece by Alfred Schnittke, a Russian polystylist composer who spent most of his life behind the Iron Curtain. Schnittke is underrated. This is perhaps due to his post-modern tendencies, which for lesser composers can be a veil for lack of substance. That’s not the case in this piece. Take a listen to the fifth movement of his Concerto Grosso No. 1 (1977).  It is a great example of how Schnittke freely takes from disparate styles to create an unpredictably effective result”. David Werfelmann

IANNIS XENAKIS

PITHOPRAKTA
During the 1950s and early 1960s‚ Iannis Xenakis represented an alternative avant­garde‚ with a radical approach to form and texture that rejected the serial mechanics of Boulez and Stockhausen‚ and involved a uniquely intense interpretation of ideas about probability and randomness. A world away from John Cage’s laid­back experiments[…] The two short orchestral works‚ Metastasis and Pithoprakta‚ are undoubtedly far more austere‚ more primitive in their overall effect‚ than the exuberant‚ hyperactive Eonta‚ whose ferociously demanding writing for piano and five brass players pulsates with the kind of creative energy that the orchestral pieces seek to suppress.

glenn gould

goldberg variations
Bach’s Goldberg Variations—a set of 30 contrapuntal variations beginning and ending with an aria—were outside the standard piano repertoire, having been recorded on the instrument only a few times before, either on small labels or unreleased.The work was considered esoteric and technically demanding, requiring awkward hand crossing at times when played on a piano (these passages would be played on two manuals on a harpsichord). Gould’s album both established the Goldberg Variations within the contemporary classical repertoire and made him an internationally famous pianist nearly “overnight”. First played in concert by Gould in 1954, the composition was a staple of Gould’s performances in the years following the recording.

Compagnie marie chouinard

МАРИ ШУИНАР
24 preludes by chopin
Playing with the very structure of these preludes written for the piano, Marie Chouinard has created a pure, lavish piece. Guided by intuition and the melodic force of these free form musical pieces, she has fashioned a composite dance consisting of solos, duos, trios and group movements that marry gentleness with strength, and subtlety with rawness. more

Arvo Part

АРВО ПЯРТ
Silentium
Tabula Rasa – II.

The second movement of Tabula Rasa, “Silentium,” or silence, is composed in the key of D minor, giving the impression of a V-I cadence in relation to “Ludus” in A minor. The movement begins with an arpeggiated D minor second inversion chord, played by the prepared piano. “Silentium” expands as a mensuration canon. Pärt divides the instruments into three sections; solo violins, violin I and violin II, and viola and cello. Each pair, divided into melodic and tintinnabuli voices, begin on a central pitch, and move at a different rhythmic speeds. Pärt expands the music by adding one pitch above and below the central pitch of each pair in each successive section. Every time the solo violins reach their central pitch, “D,” the piano again plays a D minor chord and the contrabass plays an octave “D.” Once each of the sections reach their expanded octave range, they fade out of the texture. The solo violins, moving at the slowest rhythmic speed, reach their octave span in measure 130, and then begin a downward descent of a D minor four-octave scale.

John Cage

Music of Changes

Music of Changes was the second work Cage composed to be fully indeterminate in some sense (the first is Imaginary Landscape No. 4, completed in April 1951, and the third movement of Concerto for prepared piano also used chance), and the first instrumental work that uses chance throughout. He was still using magic square-like charts to introduce chance into composition, when, in early 1951, Christian Wolff presented Cage with a copy of the I Ching (Wolff’s father published a translation of the book at around the same time). This Chinese classic text is a symbol system used to identify order in chance events. For Cage it became a perfect tool to create chance-controlled compositions: he would “ask” the book questions about various aspects of the composition at hand, and use the answers to compose. The vast majority of pieces Cage completed after 1951 were created using the I Ching.