Contemporary Classics March 12, 2009 - Celebration of Composer Vivian Fung

Tonight we are celebrating Canadian composer Vivian Fung who now lives in California.  I had the pleasure of talking with her when we were both at the Winnipeg New Music Festival back in January.  Tonight's show will include my conversation with her and her music.

We will begin tonight's celebration with a performance of her Glimpses for prepared piano.  Here is what Frank J. Oteri wrote about this work "Glimpses (2006), the earliest of the three works, is a set of three miniatures scored for a “prepared piano,” a piano whose timbre has been altered as a result of attaching various objects to its strings. In Kotekan metal binder clips, mini plastic hairclips, Scotch-taped popsicle sticks, and a metal bar are placed on various strings, altering the pitch and timbre of a chain of gamelan-inspired interlocking ostinatos played on the piano keys. In Snow, the ostinatos frequently become untangled, exposing single lines, frequently in the upper register. Herein the string timbres are altered by plastic clothes pins, sticky paper, and, again, a metal bar. Chant requires a broad range of techniques. In addition to striking the prepared strings with the piano keys, the pianist must also pull a rosined piece of twine that has been tied to a piano string to produce a deep drone, pluck the strings inside the piano (with and without a guitar pick or a rubber wedge), and drop a porcelain bowl directly onto the strings. The resultant sounds are often eerie and otherworldly."

Next our conversation with Vivian and discussion of her works the "Clarinet Quintet: Frenetic Memories" and "The Ice is Talking".

In the second hour of the program following our conversation with Vivian Fung, we will begin with her Piano Concerto “Dreamscapes”.  Again Frank J. Oteri writes "

Like the Violin Concerto, the Piano Concerto (2009), subtitled “Dreamscapes,” also begins quietly and is parsed as a single continuous movement with clearly delineated sections, in this case a prologue, four vignettes, and a postlude. The prologue opens with the pianist plucking a melody directly on the strings with a plectrum to the accompaniment of a pair of slit drums and seven Vietnamese bird whistles blown into by the wind players who are spatially scattered. (In live performance, the players are situated in various locations in the audience.) The drums and whistles are soon joined by the strings, as the pianist returns to the keys and the wind players begin to play standard orchestral instruments. The first vignette begins with a series of brutal, Bartókian chords played on the piano keys in an off-kilter, five-beat rhythm. The other instruments join in, creating a dense, contrapuntal web. The second vignette is an expansion of Kotekan (the first movement of Glimpses); additional orchestral layers, playing both with and against the continuous piano ostinatos, create an almost jazzy feel. The third vignette, in contrast, is much dreamier. It opens with the pianist again plucking the strings inside the piano against fluttering in the winds and a series of breezy sounds produced by whispering nonsense syllables into the mouthpieces of the instruments. At one point toward this section’s conclusion, the wind players stop breathing into their instruments altogether and the only sound they produce is a faint clicking made by fingering patterns on the keys of their instruments. The fourth vignette begins with a relentless cascade on the piano keys. The orchestra joins in, equally frenetic, only subsiding when the pianist forcefully attacks the keys in a series of two-handed glissandi down the full length of the keyboard. A muscular, unaccompanied solo cadenza follows, in which the pianist reiterates the various motives that have been introduced throughout the concerto. The brief concluding postlude returns to a relative calm. At the very end, all the musicians in the orchestra put down their instruments and pick up wine glasses, rubbing their rims to yield haunting, sustained pitches as the pianist plays a series of ascending figurations."

We will conclude this broadcast celebrating the music of composer Vivian Fung with three of her four "MIniatures" for clarinet and string quartet:  "Floating", "Light and Playful"  and "Improvisation-like"