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~ Boulder Bach Beat hopes to stimulate conversations about the ways Bach’s music succeeds in building bridges between populations separated by language, culture, geography and time.

Boulder Bach Beat

Tag Archives: Ástor Piazzolla

Joanna MacGregor Crosses Tonal Grounds

31 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Music Education, Other Artists

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aria, Ástor Piazzolla, Brighton, Buenos Aires, Cold War, comedy, Couperin, Django Bates, English Channel, Four for Tango, fugue, godfather, harmony, Harrison Birtwistle, Joanna MacGregor, Kathy Evans, Leipzig, London, mafia, Melbourne, Messiaen, Metropolis New Music Festival, Musical Toys, Old Testament, opera, ornamentation, piano, Pierre Boulez, prelude, Rapunzel, Royal Academy of Music, Shostakovich, Sofia Gubaidulina, SoundCircus, Steinway & Sons, Talvin Singh, The Sydney Morning Herald, Tiger Mother, toccata, tragedy, trill

Joanna MacGregor

Joanna MacGregor

Pianist Joanna MacGregor heads, Rapunzel-like, to the top of a tower and stares out across to where the pebbled lips of the coastline kiss the slate blue waters of the English Channel. Here she will stay for hours, because this is where she keeps her Steinway; safely out of earshot “which is really important for the neighbors.” You’d think in the seaside town of Brighton that the locals would be queuing up to hear her perform on a daily basis (without having to shell out), but clearly MacGregor is as anxious as the rest of us when it comes to maintaining diplomatic relations with the residents in her street.

She is busy preparing for her latest globetrotting tour, which will take in Portugal and New Zealand, before she arrives in Melbourne for the Metropolis New Music Festival. It might be a celebration of the contemporary, but of course MacGregor will be playing Bach – almost three hundred years dead but still sounding deliciously “modern.” The innovative pianist might be known for casting her net wide in search of distinctive collaborations, but Bach is never far behind. The ”new music” part comes from the presence of Shostakovich, Messiaen and English composer Harrison Birtwistle, whose pieces are interwoven throughout the program.

Like a giddy journey in a time-machine through collisions of era and continent, her concert program begins in Germany during the Baroque period before heading east to a chilly Soviet Union followed by a hook turn through France, then back to a thawed-out Russia via Britain. She finishes in Buenos Aires with Four, for Tango from the master of the bandoneon, Astor Piazzolla.”Yes, I suppose it is quite a journey,” she laughs. “I hadn’t really thought of it that way.”

It all starts with a handful of Bach’s now-famous preludes and fugues – the Old Testament of keyboard repertoire – made up of forty-eight short pieces in every key imaginable, from which she segues into Shostakovich’s preludes and fugues. But don’t be deceived by the somewhat pedagogical title. Wrapped up in each of these little pieces, only a few minutes long, is an entire musical world in microcosm where fiery toccatas, ceremonial entrances, operatic arias meet comic moments and tragic dramas.

How Shostakovich, who found Bach “boring,” came to emulate his iconic keyboard work is, says MacGregor, a classic Cold War tale. Sent against his will as a cultural ambassador to Leipzig in 1950, the composer found himself morosely sitting on the jury of the first international Bach Competition. But his ears pricked up when a Russian pianist sat down and played from The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846-93), as the Bach collection is known. Impressed, he returned to Moscow and penned twenty-four of his own. “It’s interesting how the two hundred years between the composers completely dissolves when you play them,” says MacGregor. “I do a little trick at the end when I play two Shostakovich fugues, one after the other, and then finish with Bach. By then the audience shouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”

Maybe, but when it comes to the crunch, which does she prefer? “Bach,” she says without missing a beat. “He’s the main man. With a lot of Western music it all goes back to Bach. All the harmonic progressions and techniques are absolutely watertight. You can’t get away from him. He’s like a godfather in a mafia way. He’s just there and present in everything.”

In keeping with this year’s festival theme, the natural world, she has selected a number of works that revolve around birds. Hot on the heels of the winged medley comes works by Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, innocently entitled Musical Toys, which, she says, like the best fairy tales, are a perfect mix of enchantment and fear.

MacGregor has spent her life nudging classical music into new territories and has collaborated with the likes of jazz musician and composer Django Bates, Talvin Singh, the father of modern Asian electronic music, and the French pianist, composer and writer, Pierre Boulez. In line with her determination to dismantle musical barriers, she also runs her own record label, SoundCircus.

Her drive towards the eclectic and intuitive modus operandi comes, perhaps, from not having been hot-housed as a child. Despite being the daughter of a piano teacher, MacGregor says she never felt pressure to practice; there were no Tiger Mother schedules to uphold. “Playing for me is as natural as breathing. To be a musician, you have to have a desire to listen and explore music. If you are one of those kids who are forced to practice you end up utterly miserable.” At the Royal Academy of Music in London, where she is head of piano, there are only a handful of students who have been hot-housed. “What you are looking for in young people . . . is this absolute natural response and enthusiasm and ebullience when they hear music, rather than cracking the whip.”

It is time for MacGregor to head back up the tower to revisit those tonal universes of the preludes and fugues or to recapture the trills and ornamental chirrups of Couperin’s birds. She does so with a cheerful heart. “It’s all so enjoyable, I can’t think of anything better.”

Kathy Evans – The Sydney Morning Herald

Virtual Australians

16 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Other Artists, Video Recordings, World View

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ACO Virtual, ACO2, application, Arts Centre Gold Coast, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Ástor Piazzolla, bikini, Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 in G Major, cello, digital media installation, Fox Studios, Grieg, icon, John Hibberd, loudspeaker, Michela Ledwidge, microphone, mobile telephone, Mod Productions, optical effects, Richard Tognetti, Roger Smalley, sheet music, Strung Out, Sydney, tablet, Timo-Veikko Valve, Timothy Calnin, violin, violoncello

VirtualcropIt’s a crisp winter’s morning in the bikini capital of Australia and the Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) is performing to a small audience in the gallery at the Arts Centre Gold Coast. This, however, is no ordinary concert: this is ACO Virtual.

Richard Tognetti appears as a silhouette clutching a violin against a beam of blue light. Then, with the first brilliant notes of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 in G Major (BWV 1048), the head of the ACO is illuminated, plying his strings, knees bending to the ebbs and flows of the music.

Tognetti is among thirteen members of the orchestra who have been filmed playing Bach, Grieg, Roger Smalley and Piazzolla  for a new thirty-minute digital media installation. Footage of the players is projected on to the walls of the gallery. Each musician is heard playing from a speaker next to their projection. All the sounds culminate in an orchestra. “You get something you can never get in a concert hall,” says ACO general manager Timothy Calnin. “You get the experience of standing inside the orchestra.”

Listening to the music is just one facet of the performance. A mobile phone application created for the installation can be used to identify the players and display profiles on their instruments. The audience can also control the performance using a tablet, which rests on a plinth in the gallery and alters the volume and focus of the installation. For example, tapping on the icon of cellist Timo-Veikko Valve playing an excerpt of Smalley’s Strung Out puts him in the spotlight by blacking out the other musicians and muffling the sounds of their instruments. Another function activates a roll of sheet music at the foot of the projections corresponding to the notes being played by the musicians. “For a violin student it’s a really exciting interactive musical opportunity,” Calnin says. “[For example] you could learn the first violin part by watching the way Richard plays it.”

ACO Virtual started life three years ago as a way of expanding the orchestra’s reach to regional areas. Calnin says that each year the orchestra plays about ninety subscription concerts across the country with its main arm and visits at least two states with its touring arm ACO2. Still, there are areas, such as southwest Western Australia, the orchestra only visits once every four years. “We were trying to figure out a way to offer a really worthwhile experience of the orchestra in places we couldn’t get to every year,” Calnin says. “So this idea evolved of an immersive interactive installation of the orchestra.”

The orchestra approached Mod Productions, an interactive media company in Sydney, about creating a “virtual” tour of the players using live performance footage. Mod director Michela Ledwidge says the first thing she did was plonk herself on the floor of the ACO studios in Sydney to listen to the musicians rehearsing. Sitting just a few feet away from the musicians, Ledwidge was amazed at their skill and dexterity. She also realized few people were able to get this close to the orchestra.”No matter how good your seats are, the concert hall ticket-goer never gets to experience a chamber orchestra like this,” she says. “The project started with a very simple idea. We wanted to give people the privilege of standing in the midst of some of the world’s top classical musicians.”

Ledwidge filmed and recorded the orchestra playing at Fox Studios in Sydney. She spaced the musicians 2.5m apart and set separate microphones on their instruments. This has allowed audiences to isolate the different players in the installation.

At the Arts Centre, John Hibberd, a community radio station manager, soaks up the music. Hibberd says he is impressed with the installation. The 72-year-old has downloaded the ACO Virtual application on his phone and holds it up near the projection of Valve. As he is scrolling his finger across the screen, a smile breaks out on his face. “Here you go,” he says, pointing at an image of the cellist on the device. “That’s him.”

– The Australian

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