Modern and Contemporary

Transformation – Interactive works for piano
Megumi Masaki
Centrediscs CMCDVD 29322 (cmccanada.org/product-category/recordings/centrediscs)

Japanese-Canadian Megumi Masaki is an internationally renowned pianist, multimedia performing artist, educator and curator who was recently appointed Director of Music at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. The DVD Transformation features her performing three interactive Canadian compositions for piano and new technology, each composed in collaboration with Masaki. A project documentary follows.

Orpheus (1) by T. Patrick Carrabré (composer, live electronics) and Margaret Atwood (poetry), for piano, toy piano, synthesizer and voice, challenges the Orpheus myth as a love story. Electronic sound washes open, then Masaki’s musically played simple lines and white snowflake-like specks on the blue backdrop. Faster accessible music, keyboard lines, spoken poetry, electronic rumbles/washes and backdrop scenes add excitement.

Piano Games by Keith Hamel (composer, software designer, live computer operator) for piano, hand tracking and live interactive video which responds to the piano sounds and hand positions, making each performance different. Backdrop lightning-like flashes and swirls match Masaki’s outfit colours. Hostile loud sounds and exploding lights to calming softer sounds and slower swirls to the pianist’s physical gestures, this is gaming chamber music!

Dōshite? どうして? by Bob Pritchard (composer, SHRUG designer, live computer operator) for piano, voice and movement honours the over 21,000 Japanese Canadians sent to internment camps in 1942 during WWII. Use of spoken text from Tsukiye Muriel Kitagawa’s book This is My Own (editor Roy Miki’s permission), a film featuring black and white photos from this time and piano music including Japanese song fragments “is offered as a form of apology”. 

Masaki and each composer talk about their musical and technological creative process and working together in the informative Transformation Documentary Film.

The music, visuals and hi-tech interactions on Transformation are indeed unforgettably transforming.

...and the Lord Hath Taken Away
The Holy Gasp
Independent  (theholygasp.bandcamp.com)

If, like me, you had neither heard of, nor listened to, The Holy Gasp before, the mere thought of approaching this album would be to expect something spiritually inclined. After all an ensemble called The Holy Gasp… well, what other kind of music would the ensemble make? Moreover, the album is titled … and the Lord Hath Taken Away, a direct quote from The Book of Job, of the Bible’s Old Testament spoken by the afflicted man himself at the height of his long suffering.

However, as it turns out, the ensemble’s frontman, Toronto-born poet, composer and vocalist of repute, Benjamin Hackman – knowledgeable as he as about scripture – is also a wonderfully free-thinking musician who can wield his impressive tenor voice and move easily between a kind of opera recitative, he’s-a-jolly-good-fellow klezmer, moaning blues-inflected vocals and any other style that his extraordinary music demands.  

Hackman’s multi-faceted skills and this shape-shifting music are eloquently articulated by the musicians in this large ensemble. And it is all held together as if in an enormous musical sculpture by the extraordinary Robert W. Stevenson who conducts it all. To experience a snapshot version simply skip from the darkening of The Merry Man of Uz to Who Framed Moishe Hackman? to the rollicking Everything Where It Should Be. But do that and you will be missing out on 15 other songs, each with its own evocative mystery and musical thrill. 

Listen to '...and the Lord Hath Taken Away' Now in the Listening Room

Za Klavir: For the Piano
Nina Platiša
Independent (ninaplatisa.com)

Elemental and concise – most under three minutes – the 27 pieces of Za Klavir: (For the Piano), composed between 2018 and 2022, are subtly spiced with piquant sprinkles of Balkan folk idioms. Engagingly varied in tempo, rhythm and mood, they share unadorned melodic lines and sparse accompaniments, often only simple pedal points.

Belgrade-born composer/pianist Nina Platiša, now based in Guelph, came to Canada as a three-year-old in 1994. Responding to my email query, she wrote, “When I was young, my mom taught my sister and me Balkan folk songs… As I began to compose the solo piano pieces that would eventually make up this album, the music to which I felt the closest connection was often the simplest, pieces with simple melodies and harmonies akin to those of Balkan folk music – unpretentious and transparent. They seemed to issue from me naturally.”

Save for the concluding Saputnik (Companion) No.1, the pieces are numbered, not named. In an interview posted online, Platiša described three of them, beginning with the solemn No.7. “I saw an image of it being played at the funeral of my grandfather or great uncle. I pictured my family and friends dancing to No.20 at my family’s slava (saint’s day) and I saw myself playing No.25 for a newborn baby.”

I was particularly enchanted by the delicate, melancholy beauties of Nos.5, 11, 14 and 19, reminiscent of Satie’s haunting Gymnopédies. I found Za Klavir compelling listening throughout; you may, too.

Listen to 'Za Klavir: For the Piano' Now in the Listening Room

Emilie Cecilia LeBel – field studies
Jane Berry; Cheryl Duvall; UltraViolet; Ilana Waniuk
Redshift Records TK530 (emilielebel.ca/discography)

Prolific Canadian composer Emilie LeBel has roots in the contemporary concert music scenes in Toronto and Edmonton. Recorded in both cities, field studies features five chamber works composed between 2016 and 2022.

It’s tempting to describe LeBel’s accomplished and mature compositional language as postminimalism. On closer listening however, it’s in turn austere, serene and sonically challenging, but also lush and lyrical. It embraces solitary long tones as well as complex harmonies and microtonal gestures. This complexity questions any neat “minimal” pigeonholing. 

Another sonic signature is LeBel’s ingenious use of coloured noise, exploiting the vast spectrum between conventional instrumental tone and white noise. In even if nothing but shapes and light reflected in the glass for alto flute, baritone sax and electronics, “tactile transducers on prepared snare and tom drums” supply the sonic grit. They provide a textural counterpoint to the two wind instruments’ built-in wind sounds as well as to their more typical lyrical voices.

Nor is LeBel afraid of boldly combining inherently contrasting instruments. For example, evaporation, blue is scored for the unlikely paring of piano and harmonica, both played with conviction and delicacy by Toronto pianist Cheryl Duvall.

LeBel’s considerable orchestration chops are aided by her close attention to the strengths and limitations of instruments and voices. Beautifully played by Ilana Waniuk, further migration for solo violin illustrates the former, while drift for voice and chamber ensemble animated by Jane Barry’s relaxed voice, the latter. I wouldn’t be surprised if an opera is in LeBel’s future.