This spring, I greatly enjoyed giving two recitals of music by Rand Steiger and Kaija Saariaho. Rand ran the live electronics. We performed at National Sawdust in Brooklyn and again at UC San Diego’s Prebys Music Center a few weeks later. The program was mostly works with electronics: two premieres by Rand – Nimbus and longing – and Kaija Saariaho’s Frises from 2011. I also played Kaija’s short Nocturne at the start of the program.
The livestream video:
Rand’s pieces use live processing of the violin sounds in very evocative, beautiful ways. Longing layers the violin tones and extends them with reverb for extra-long, continued sonority, much like the sustain pedal of a piano. Nimbus is his re-composition of a kaleidoscopic sound installation he made for Disney Hall in Los Angeles.
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Kaija Saariaho composed the 4-movement Frises to be performed following the Bach D minor Partita. Commissioned by an art center in Istanbul, Frises was also inspired by these artworks (below) by Odilon Redon – Frise jaune, Frise de fleurs, Frise grise – and, in the 3rd movement, by MC Escher’s paintings. (I picked this one below as an example.) The last movement sounds to me like a Muslim prayer.
Frises and Nocturne are such a pleasure to play, as you can melt and shift among many sonic colors, and relish the long breaths of phrases and the arc of each movement and the piece as a whole.
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I also very highly recommend Saariaho’s latest opera Innocence, a masterwork both musically and theatrically. Some of the music’s expressive qualities are strikingly different from her works for solo strings and electronics.
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