Friday 5 May 2017, 7.30pm
An evening of string trios, duos and solos by three Canadian experimental composers with strongly individual voices: Marc Sabat, Martin Arnold and Linda Catlin Smith. Performed by musicians from Apartment House, the concert features the world premiere of a new work for solo cello by Arnold, and UK premieres of recent works by Sabat and Catlin Smith.
Produced with kind assistence from the Socan Foundation, Canada.
PROGRAMME:
- Martin Arnold: ‘Slip Minuet’ (solo violin)
- Marc Sabat: ‘Claudius Ptolemy’ (violin & cello)
- Linda Catlin Smith: ‘Ricercar’ (solo cello) UK premiere
- Marc Sabat: ‘Gioseffo Zarlino’ (violin & viola) UK premiere of duo version
- Linda Catlin Smith: ‘Galanthus’ (violin) UK premiere
- Marc Sabat: ‘Jean Philippe Rameau’ (version for string trio)
- Martin Arnold: world premiere of new work for solo cello
Musicians: Mira Benjamin, Bridget Carey & Anton Lukoszevieze
Marc Sabat’s music offers a unique combination: a rigour coming from his systematic engagement with the principles of just intonation, and an underlying lyricism which allows the music to appeal far more widely than it would if it were an academic exercise. Nick Storing says of Sabat that “the seemingly unsoluble tension between his music’s stark underlying logic and its aspirations towards the ineffable is what makes it so wondrously beguiling.” The Jack Quartet recently recorded a CD of his music for Another Timbre’s Canadian Composers Series, and two of those pieces can be heard this evening, along with ‘Gioseffo Zarlino’, a duo for violin and viola. Now living in Berlin, Sabat is flying over for to be present at the concert.
Martin Arnold is a maverick composer based in Toronto, who until recently earned his living as a gardener while also writing some of the most distinctive outsider music in North America. He describes his music as meandering, psychedelic, slow-motion dance music, which “aspires to sound like it was recorded underwater in a methadone clinic”. His work uses long melodies which he extends and twists until they become strange. His compositions are championed by a number of world-class performers, including the Quatuor Bozzini, Apartment House and the pianist Philip Thomas. Two of his solo pieces will be played tonight, both by the musicians for whom they were written. The concerts opens with violinist Mira Benjamin playing ‘Slip Minuet’, and ends with cellist Anton Lukoszevieze playing the world premiere of a new work.
Linda Catlin Smith has a growing reputation as a composer of deceptively simple and gentle, yet unorthodox and steely music. Her recent CDs ‘Dirt Road’ and ‘Drifter’ on Another Timbre and ‘Thought and Desire’ on World Edition have awakened an interest in her music internationally, and have received stunning reviews. Tim Rutherford Johnson has said that “Smith has a gift – one that I particularly treasure when I find it in music – of turning things suddenly and surprisingly into a new light…. Her time has, finally, come.” And Alex Ross has described her music simply as “a world that you’d want to live in.” This concert features two recent works for solo strings, ‘Galanthus’ for violin, and ‘Ricercar’ for cello.
