NEW WAVE MUSIC: In Other Words

Classical music has always been built, in part, on acts of creative theft — composers borrowing from the streets, the fields, and the festivals around them, and transforming what they found into something their own language. So what happens to music when a composer picks it up off the street and takes it into the concert hall? In Other Words is an exploration of how three composers from three very different cultural landscapes have answered that question.

The programme opens with the world premiere of Mařatka’s Afro, a new commission for the Prague Spring International Piano Competition, in which freely flowing melodies and shimmering harmonies weave together influences from diverse African musical traditions as well as the composer’s fascination with pehistoric instruments like the bone flute. Albéniz’s Iberia Book 1 follows — three pieces in which a Spaniard living in Paris pours the sounds of Andalusian folk music, flamenco, and religious procession into music of extraordinary complexity and colour. The concert closes with Barber’s Excursions: blues, boogie-woogie, country music, and barn dance, refracted through the sensibility of a mid-century American composer.

From Africa to Andalusia to Appalachia, In Other Words is a musical travelogue that traces a single question across three very different approaches to celebration and reinvention: what does it mean to celebrate the music of a place, and what does the act of creation do to it in the process?