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| Bowed Piano Ensemble Performs the Music of Stephen Scott The Bowed Piano Ensemble will perform Stephen Scott's compositions, New York Drones and The Deep Spaces with soprano soloist Victoria Hansen at The Allen Room, Frederick P. Rose Hall, Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center on Saturday, October 28. The Bowed Piano Ensemble is an elite group of ten student, faculty and staff musicians exploring the leading edge of performance with sounds made directly on the strings of a grand piano which result in an orchestral array of tone colors, harmonies and rhythms. Ms. Hansen and the Ensemble gave the world premiere of The Deep Spaces in the medieval Town Hall in Tallinn, Estonia in March 2005 and have recorded the work for Starkland Records. The Deep Spaces is a fantasy song-cycle celebrating the power and grandeur--evoked by poets and composers over two millennia--of one of the world's most dazzling and enchanting locales: Lake Como, surely the brightest jewel in the crown of alps and mountain lakes that adorns Italy's far north, just below Switzerland. The song texts, set for soprano soloist with the ensemble serving as accompanying orchestra (and, occasionally, chorus), are taken from writers as distant in time, culture, psychology and aesthetic stance from one another as Pliny the Younger, aristocratic native of Como and chronicler of many aspects of Roman life in the first and second centuries A.D., and Pablo Medina, twenty-first-century poet and novelist of Cuban ancestry residing and teaching in New York. Listeners may also recognize musical themes and motives borrowed from composers linked to Como such as Liszt and Berlioz, woven together with Scott's own melodies and textures. What ties all of these artists together is their attraction to and connection with Lake Como and, more generally, Northern Italy. Scott's composition of The Deep Spaces was made possible by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, at whose Study and Conference Center on Lake Como he was in residence in June, 2004. New York Drones, the newest in Mr. Scott’s series of bowed piano compositions, will receive its world premiere performances October 26 and 28, 2006 at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center and the Allen Room, Frederick P. Rose Hall, Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, in New York. The work is dedicated to the great American composer Steve Reich in honor of his seventieth birthday this month. Steven Scott had this to say about this tribute to Mr. Reich: "I personally owe Steve a great debt of gratitude; as a young and basically clueless composer, I went to Ghana in 1970 to study polyrhythmic drumming and ran into Steve, who was there for the same reason and whom I knew of and admired for his early compositions Come Out and Violin Phase. He took me under his wing and gave me a listening and score-reading tour of his current work. Later I collaborated with Terry Riley, one of Steve’s important influences, and these two composers became my most significant inspirations as I began to develop my own musical ideas. In this piece I’ve interpreted the concept of drones quite liberally to encompass not only long-sustained tones but also repeating rhythms on one pitch or repeating melodic and harmonic patterns in a single mode. Perhaps paradoxically, the work is also marked by more changes in tempo than might be expected in its relatively short time-span." The Ensemble's most recent recording, Paisajes Audibles/Sounding Landscapes, with Ms. Hansen as soprano soloist, is available on Albany Records (Troy 649). James Keller, writing in ChamberMusic magazine, finds the work to be "...at times touching on Puccinian lyricism, flamenco bravura, and reminiscences of courtly dances...anchored by a mysteriously seductive refrain that helps bind the hour into a coherent, compelling whole." Charles Ward of The Houston Chronicle wrote that the work is "...a well-written, highly communicative expression of a strong, haunting idea. I'd love to hear it again." write your comments about the article :: © 2006 Jazz News :: home page |