Zubin Kanga, Wiki Piano @ Music Current 2021

Zubin Kanga, Wiki Piano @ Music Current 2021

Monday, 8 November 2021, 8.00pm

This programme contains depictions of nudity, violence and drug-taking.

Australian pianist and new music adventurer Zubin Kanga performs in Dublin for the first time. A champion of collaboration and new music commissioning, Zubin performs a highly personal programme entirely of works he personally commissioned for piano and electronics.

In this concert, Zubin Kanga performs piano and multimedia works exploring internet culture, classic cinema, historical pianists, magnetic resonators and electronic doppelgängers.

Alexander Schubert’s WIKI-PIANO.NET uses a website to allow the audience to co-compose the work especially for each performance – the audience can link to sound files, youtube videos, change text and instructions, just like a Wikipedia page, creating a work that reflects the memes and internet obsessions at the time of each performance. 

Fergal Dowling pairs the piano with an interactive electronic twin, increasing in complexity until the divisions between real and fake break down. 

Scott McLaughlin uses modified e-bows and magnetic resonators to create strange, gradually morphing otherworldly sounds. Hammerklavier, a collaboration between composer

Michael Finnissy and filmmaker Adam de la Cour is based on Finnissy’s memories of a live performance by the great pianist Sviatoslav Richter in 1975, as well as Richter’s secretive queer life. The work transforms each movement of Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ sonata, with de la Cour’s film drawing on documentary footage of Richter, experimental film techniques of the 50s and 60s, as well as vintage gay erotica from this era. Part 2 of the work (transforming the first two movements of Beethoven’s sonata) receives its World Premiere in this concert.

And Nicole Lizée’s celebrated Criterion Collection works use loops and glitches to transform key scenes, creating obsessive homages to great filmmakers. This recital features the revised version of her set focused on the films of Martin Scorsese, drawing on iconic scenes from Goodfellas, Taxi Driver and The Wolf of Wall Street. 

Alexander Schubert, “WIKI-PIANO.NET” (2018) Irish Premiere
Fergal Dowling, “Fake Piano”* (2021) World Premiere
Scott McLaughlin, “In the unknown, there is already a script for transcendence”** (2018) Irish Premiere
Michael Finnissy/Adam de la Cour, “Hammerklavier”** (Part 2) (2021) World Premiere
Nicole Lizée, “Scorsese Etudes” (2018 rev. 2021) World Premiere 

Book here

* Commissioned by Zubin Kanga with the support of the Arts Council commission award. 

** Commissioned with the support of Arts Council England.

Zubin Kanga’s work as composer, performer and researcher is supported by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship.

***

Dublin Sound Lab presents
MUSIC CURRENT 2021
CONTEMPORARY ELECTRONIC MUSIC FESTIVAL
SMOCK ALLEY THEATRE :: 8–11 November, 2021 :: www.smockalley.com

MUSIC CURRENT is Back! Dublin’s annual new music festival returns with six concerts in four days featuring the best of new Irish and international contemporary electronic music, Smock Alley Theatre, 8–11 November 2021. MUSIC CURRENT, now in its fifth year, gives a platform for the newest contemporary electronic music. This year’s festival has a decidedly multi-media flavour, featuring: interactive web-based performance, performance with video, computer-based score following, private YouTube performances transported to the concert hall, guns, shovels and even buckets of sand.

Monday 8 November, 8pm – Zubin Kanga, Wiki Piano
Tuesday 9 November, 7pm – Music Current Soloists, Currents
Tuesday 9 November, 8pm – Darragh Morgan, Anthèmes
Wednesday 10 November, 8pm – Bastard Assignments, Execution
Thursday 11 November, 6pm – Lina Andonovska, Public Privacy
Friday 11 November, 8pm – Richard Craig, Vale
Tickets for each concert are €15/10. Book tickets here.

The festival opens with the Irish debut concert of Australian pianist and new music adventurer Zubin Kanga, who performs in Dublin for the first time. A champion of collaboration and new music commissioning, Zubin performs a highly personal programme entirely of works he personally commissioned for piano and electronics, featuring: the Irish premiere of Alexander Schubert’s WIKI- PIANO.NET, in which audience members can add to, or alter, the score; Michael Finnissy’s and Adam de la Cour’s, new Beethoven-inspired “Hammerklavier (Part 2)”; the world premiere of Nicole Lizée’s, revised “Scorsese Etudes”; as well as new works for piano and electronics by Scott McLaughlin and Fergal Dowling

Every year MUSIC CURRENT invites composers from around the world to develop new works for the festival. This year seven Irish composers have been invited to collaborate with five Irish soloists to prepared a concert of entirely new works based on the their year-long collaboration. The resulting Music Current Soloists Concert is a thought-provoking mix of intimate, imaginative, challenging and playful new works by established and next generation composers: Seán O’Dálaigh, Elis Czerniak, Jane Deasy, Gráinne Mulvey, Darragh Kelly, Paul Scully, Neil O’Connor, with works performed by Paul Roe, Marja Gaynor, Ilse de Ziah, Joe O’Farrell and Darragh Morgan.

This concert is normally associated with new works developed within the festival, rather than in advance, with one of the participating composers being offered a commission for the following year’s festival. This year the commission award will be open to online submissions and the announcement will be made at this event.

This programme is part of a double-bill concert which also showcases “classic” works from the repertoire. Darragh Morgan, one of the most highly regarded interpreters of contemporary music, will give the Irish concert premiere of Pierre Boulez’s “Anthèmes 2”, a seminal work for solo violin and electronics, in which the computer literally “follows” Darragh’s performance in real-time and renders a live accompaniment. Boulez’s masterwork is twinned with Frank Lyon’s recent commission “Spin 2”, commissioned by Darragh Morgan, the work follows similar development to Anthèmes 2, having undergone revisions and addition of an electronic part.

The festival sees the Irish debut of renowned London-based iconoclasts, Bastard Assignments, who bring their unique brand of collaborative composition and ensemble performance to Dublin in a programme of four recent works. This concert is a true multi-media performance that defies the limits of what is considered music – this is a show that can only be experienced live.

The festival closes with a double-bill concert of Irish and international works for flute and electronics. Australian flautist, Lina Andonovska gives a programme exclusively of Irish premiers featuring some of the most widely performed international composers of the current generation, including: Brigitta Muntendorf’s “Public Privacy #1 (flute cover)”, a study on the schizophrenic relationship between at-home YouTuber soloists and their very public performances; David Fennessy’s new work, “Bridge”; and the Irish premieres of Nicole Lizée’s cinema-inspired “Tarantino Etudes”.

Renowned Scottish flautist and new music champion, Richard Craig, closes the festival with a programme of recent works built around Richard Barrett’s “Vale”, mesmeric study for amplified flute. Richard will also premiere Seán O’Dálaigh’s intimate and searching “Landscape II” for flute; a work Seán wrote especially for Richard in response to the Music Current 2019 commission.

For more, visit www.musiccurrent.ie and https://smockalley.com/music-current-2021

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Published by Journal of Music on 20 October 2021

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