Eve Egoyan “Folklore”: some notes about the notes
Innovations en concert is delighted to present the leading contemporary music pianist Eve Egoyan in concert on Saturday, March 22, 2014 at 8 pm at Montreal’s Chapelle Historique du Bon-Pasteur. Ms. Egoyan’s program features three works composed in the last decade – James Tenney’s To Weave (a meditation), Piers Hellawell’s Piani, Latebre, and Linda Catlin Smith’s Nocturnes and Chorales – as well as Michael Finnissy’s Folkolore, Section 2, written in 1993.
The Irish composer Piers Hellawell’s work represents, in his own words, a “reaction against the ornate surfaces of much instrumental music of our time”. At the same time, his austere approach does not shrink from uniting “disparate, even dangerous, elements under one roof”, and terms like “bluesy”, “inventive”, “mysterious” recur in critics’ descriptions of his work. In a similar vein, James Tenney (1934-2006) presents a concentrated sonic reflection in his work, pondering the notions of noise as music, psychoacoustic perception, and acoustic counterpoint.
We are also proud to present the Montreal premiere of a work by a leading Canadian composer: Linda Catlin Smith, whose work is often informed by her appreciation of the work of writers and painters, including – among many others – Marguerite Duras, Cormac McCarthy, Cy Twombly, and Mark Rothko.
Ms. Egoyan’s concert will end with a performance of Folklore, Section 2 – an eclectic and expressive work and an ambitious statement upon twentieth-century humanity and culture with implications which reach beyond the purely musical. Here Finnissy speculates and comments on Gramsci’s imperative to compile an inventory of the ‘infinity of traces’ that historical processes leave on ‘the self’. For him, Folklore is “a distant memory, an assemblage, a critical elaboration, an opposition of conjunctions, an open-ended investigation, a palimpsest, a self-portrait.” Finnissy’s vision encompasses a vast range of ideals from “the piano” – “a ‘respectable’ Victorian mantelshelf” to “England” – “insular and conservative, institutionalized : de-spiritualized, tawdry and corrupt”. Finnissy’s lyrical, sensual musical language is compelling and intriguing throughout: the perfect vehicle for a preeminent Canadian performer.
-Isak Goldschneider
