National Concert Hall
March 29th, 8.30pm
€10/€5
The Irish Composers’ Collective are delighted to announce that this month’s concert will feature ICC member David Bremner and Izumi Kimura, performing seven brand new works for piano duet, exploring both the minuscule and massive, earthbound and celestial, natural laws and human relationships. Both performers specialise in contemporary keyboard music, and together should prove a formidable musical duo.
David Bremner is a pianist, organist and composer based in Dublin. he is recognised as a persuasive advocate of new music, both as soloist and accompanist and has premiered more than thirty new works. Originally from West Cumbria, UK, he moved to Ireland in 1999 following an Organ Scholarship at Keble College, Oxford. he has studied piano with Mary Lennon, and organ with David Sanger and Mark Duley. David is currently Assistant Organist and Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, and has also performed with many of Dublin’s leading ensembles, including the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, New Dublin Voices and the Crash Ensemble. He is currently completing a PhD in Composition at the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama under the supervision of Gráinne Mulvey, and is a member of the Irish Composers’ Collective. He is the co-director of the music production company Béal, and set up the band The Open Rehearsals, who explore improvised music theatre.
Japanese born but Irish resident, Izumi Kimura is a highly acclaimed practitioner or contemporary piano music. Izumi has performed extensively
throughout Ireland as a solo, orchestral and chamber musician, and she has numerous broadcasts on RTÉ Lyric FM, RTÉ One and others. She has worked with some of the leading performers and ensembles from both classical and jazz, including the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, RTÉ Concert Orchestra, Crash Ensemble, Benjamin Dwyer, and Métier among many others. She has performed at many festivals in Ireland and abroad, including RTÉ Living Music Festival, Boyle Arts Festival, Dublin Dance Festival, Dublin Fringe Festival, Ghent Street Festival of New Music, and Music 21’s ‘Brazil Now’. ‘Artes Da Irlanda, Hoje!’ in Sao Paolo. She has given many premieres of works by Irish and international composers, including a number of pieces that were written especially for her. Her solo piano album of Japanese and Irish music ‘Asymmetry’ has been chosen by broadcaster Karishmeh Felfeli “one of the most original creative and stimulating recording of 2010 to be heard on an Irish label, an absolute revelation”.
Programme:
Massimo Davi – Ephemeroptera
Sebastian Adams – Prayer for Four Hands
Ryan Molloy – Sliabh Geal gCua
Daniel Barkley – Nexus
Conal Ryan – Transfigure
Peter Moran – For Hands
Dennis Wyers – Jupiter Moons Suite
The challenge of writing for piano duet, as one of the composers puts it, “inverts the normal problems of writing for piano: rather than having too few fingers at their disposal, you now have too many!” It is a challenge that the seven composers for this piece sought to answer, each in a different way, and with different subjects, from the infinitesimal to the celestial. Massimo Davi‘s Ephemeroptera may be based on a rather unusual theme, the life of a Mayfly, but it describes a very beautiful premise: it is an intangible, fleeting set of miniatures describing in but a few minutes the allegory of life. In contrast, Dennis Wyers attempts to capture the massive, in his Jupiter Moons Suite, a set of five movements inspired by the different atmospheres on the planet and its moons. Peter Moran‘s For Hands is also concerned with the natural laws that govern sound in both micro and macro, the natural harmonics and resonances of sound, in this case of the piano itself. The set of miniatures, composed through a process of improvisation, is essentially a set of variations that use a single melody as a springboard to timbral exploration. Conal Ryan‘s Transfigure is similarly textural and timbral in intent, altering the piano sound itself, and distributing spatial arrays of an ever-distorting harmonic series. Ryan Molloy and Daniel Barkley eschewed the heavy concerns of nature and physics in favour of the ultimately human in their works, with Barkley’s Nexus written for his sister and making use of more traditional rhythms and harmonies, and Molloy’s Sliabh Geal gCua exploring an Irish traditional air of the same name and the process of aural transmission so intrinsic to traditional musics. Sebastian Adams chooses not to tell us what his piece is about, so you’ll have to come to listen to it instead!
Keep up to date on Facebook and Twitter for more information about the composers, performers and their works.
Tickets for Izumi Kimura and David Bremner cost €10/€5 conc.
and are available from The National Concert Hall Box Office at www.nch.ie
or 01 417 0000.
The Box Office is open Monday-Saturday 10am-6pm.
