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The Gryphon Trio: live in your living room

by on May 9, 2012 in Audio, Music & Sound, Podcasts

Podcaster Camara Miller speaks with former CBC host Eric Friesen about the Gryphon Trio. Photo: Don Lee.

Quartet for the End of Time, by Olivier Messiaen, is a powerful and spiritual piece of chamber music; recounting the point of view of a man who had no idea whether he was living through the end of the world, as he knew it. A haunting, but not hopeless impression left by the French composer and soldier.

It was first heard on a bitterly cold January evening in 1941, by a group of prisoners and guards in Stalag VIII-A, a POW camp in Germany. Wednesday night, people at The Banff Centre and around the world got hear the piece live from the Rolston Hall.

The Gryphon Trio, along with clarinetist James Campbell, have returned to work on their latest recording at the Centre and were rounding off the trip with an intimate concert. This isn’t the first time they’ve come to create an album up on the hill. Having played together for 20 years, they’ve stopped by many times before to play and teach.

Former CBC host Eric Friesen was also here for the concert. His time at the CBC gave him an excellent chance to get the know the players over the years, and he’s host and facilitator for the evening as the quartet plays the repertoire from their new album.

Friesen took a few minutes to chat about the Gryphon Trio, as well as the haunting details about the premiere of this piece, in an interview earlier in the week.

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The live stream sounded great and was enjoyed by many both online and at the Rolston. If you missed it, a podcast of the show along with an interview with Eric Friesen will be up soon.

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Hear, feel, move, dance…

by on May 8, 2012 in Dance, Music & Sound

Choreographer Aszure Barton and composer Curtis Macdonald. Photo: Don Lee.

“Sound is vibration, vibration is movement … and movement is dance,” Curtis Macdonald says. “It’s all connected.” He’s talking about his latest project, collaborating with internationally acclaimed choreographer Aszure Barton to compose music for her new work, PROJECT XII.

Both of them have been in Banff for the past few weeks. Macdonald is an alto sax player, composer, and sound artist, and he’s been here with Aszure and dancers from her company, Aszure Barton & Artists, working six days a week on the new work, which is backed by The Banff Centre and a who’s who of partners, including The CanDance Network Creation Fund, National Arts Centre, Danse Danse, Canada Dance Festival, Le Grand Théâtre de Québec, La danse sur les routes,  and the Canada Council for the Arts.

“There’s a subtle energy in the mountains that helps bring things to life,” Macdonald says. He’s been able to mix environmental recordings made at Lake Minnewanka and along the Bow River into the soundscape for PROJECT XII. He meets regularly with Barton and the dancers. “I sketch something, and bring a recording to their studio. They listen as they rehearse, which gives them a chance to absorb it, and then we have a dialogue about how it’s working. It’s a very organic process.”

PROJECT XII will premiere on June 8 at the 2012 Canada Dance Festival , but those of us in Banff will have the opportunity to attend a special late-night sneak preview on Saturday, June 2.

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Photo flash: March 2012

by on April 8, 2012 in General, Music & Sound

A few weeks ago, photographer Kim Williams got behind the scenes during the creation of a new work combining original music by Montreal-based composer Ana Sokolovic, the Bozzini Quartet, and dancer and choreographer Marc Boivin, a piece called Commedia Ruzzante, which audiences saw in preview in early March. Here are a few of Kim’s shots…

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A Stockhausen Music Box

Live Webcast March 16

by on March 16, 2012 in Audio, Classical, General, Music & Sound, Podcasts

Strings in action on a Friday Evening at the Rolston

Listen to our Live from the Rolston webcast beginning at 7:30pm MST, this evening, Friday, March 16!

Connect via the web to our streaming server and listen via iTunes, Winamp, and Windows Media Player.

Or try our mobile friendly stream.

Tonight is the final concert of the 2012 Fall and Winter Music residency;  featuring pianists Elizabeth Dorman and Christopher Bagan, original compositions by Diana Syrse, soprano Taylor Strande, accordionist Olivia Steimel, and the Temple Street Trio.

Click here for the full program.

The concert will be hosted by director of Fall and Winter Music programs, Henk Guittart, and broadcast by The Banff Centre’s audio department.

Opening the concert, flautist Lelland Reed will perform a new work inspired by Syrse’s original composition, Astral and Stockhausen’s Virgo music box, from his Tierkreis series.

Banff Centre sound designer Alyssa Moxley spoke to composer and singer Diana Syrse about developing the piece with Reed.

 

A Stockhausen Music Box

Diana Syrse and Lelland Reed developed a new work based on the Virgo Music Box.

 

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Collected on camera: March 1 to 9, 2012

by on March 12, 2012 in General, Music & Sound

 We asked Don Lee and Kim Williams from our Photo Services department to select a few great images from the past two weeks at The Banff Centre. For this post, they’ve given us some shots from the winter music residency.

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Ana Sokolovic: dance / theatre / music

by on March 9, 2012 in BISQC, Classical, General, Music & Sound

Ana Sokolovic, Marc Boivin, and the Bozzini Quartet in rehearsal for Commedia Ruzzante. Photo: Kim Williams.

“Here at The Banff Centre, I’m pushing myself outside of my comfort zone, because as an artist, I believe this is the only way I can move forward with my craft,” says composer and musician Ana Sokolovic. She comes to The Banff Centre this season with the Bozzini Quartet and choreographer Marc Boivin to work on her first self-prompted, multi-genre collaboration, called Commedia Ruzzante.

As a composer, Sokolovic has created more than 40 works, including compositions for stage, opera, orchestra, voice, and chamber ensembles (the Societe de musique contemporaine du Quebec’s (SMCQ) Homage Series has devoted its entire 2011 – 2012 season repertoire to her work, celebrating its scope, diversity, and quality). “In the past, the music I created just touched on one particular part of my personality, and of my creativity. With this project I’m incorporating more of myself – my love for theatre, stage, dance, and music – into one project.”

Ana Sokolovic and the Bozzini Quartet in her Banff Centre studio, rehearsing Commedia Ruzzante. Photo: Kim Williams.

After receiving two 15-minute commissions around the same time – one for the 2010 Banff International String Quartet Competition and one for the Bozzini Quartet— Sokolovic decided to combine both into one long piece and include Boivin’s choreography. “I wanted to create something that was not limited to 15 minutes, and I had a very profound, artistic, human instinct that we would all go well together,” she says.

The group has been working on this collaborative project for more than a year, and now they’ve come to Banff to perfect the performance aspects, and work on the staging. “You’ll see that there are some elements that can only come from a friendly familiarity between all parties, and that’s from taking such a long time to get to know each other artistically.”

Composer Ana Sokolovic. Photo: Kim Williams.

That familiarity has also given Sokolovic the freedom to do something else she’s never done before:  allow the Bozzini Quartet to improvise with her music. “It’s the first time in my life that I’m allowing someone to improvise with my project, because I’m usually very controlling of the whole thing,” she says with a laugh.

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