- Introduction
- Composers Notes
- Track List
Introduction / Anne Michaels
A somatic nuance that gives a sound its grief. A shadow. Almost without trace—as if time can bend imperceptibly around mortal thought.
A scrap of piano music from a small kitchen radio in Paris, through the phone line, into the degraded quality of an answering machine in Toronto; a message left in the middle of the night. I cup my ear close to the machine. I love the person whose radio it is, those thousands of miles away, and perhaps that makes me listen differently. But it is not only that. I replay the tape—a scrap, a fragment—again and again, because the profundity of the interpretation is instantly perceivable, even through the crackle and hollow hiss. In a live performance, on the purest disc, even under conditions of the poorest sound quality, we recognize it: mysterious, indefinable, pianistic “touch”.
Sound is a complex collaboration—among the instrument, the performer’s mind and body, her physical and emotional rigor and surrender, the composer’s notation, both the audience and the performer listening… The virtual elements in virtuosity—in each performance these relationships differing, shifting, responding to each other in new ways—can probably never be defined.
Eve Egoyan’s interpretation of the pieces on this disc are deeply disciplined, deeply intuitive in the best way—the intuition honed by years of work. It is a profound and passionate grasp of the music’s inner coherence; it is both listening and response.
Egoyan’s insight, and her technical range, are remarkable. Her range of tone, touch and colour is so intensely calibrated, one could almost believe she plays several different pianos on this disc. The “magic echo room” of Turn, the repeated but wholly new notes in The Art of Touching the Keyboard,the gorgeous warmth in Nuevas monodías españolas, the “glassy, solid… cold” of Crystalline, the poignant rise and fall, probing inner call and response, of Corals of Valais: within each piece an impeccably complex range of relationships. And her emotional range is astonishing; she is fully in control of the most haunting gradations of feeling. Especially moving is her evocation of the deeply embedded narrative of Trail.
These pieces, Eve Egoyan says, are “about different types of virtuosity that playing contemporary music requires, the physicality of playing the work, listening and imagining… explor(ing) new languages for the instrument….”
I know I will play this disc to someone through the phone lines in the middle of the night. I will hold the receiver to the speaker and let Egoyan’s interpretations, the integrity of her performance travel, not via disc, but in time.
“New languages”; old as feeling, old as sound.
Eve Egoyan / biography
Originally from Victoria, B.C. and currently based in Toronto, Canadian pianist Eve Egoyan specializes in the performance of new solo piano works. “The things in between”, Eve’s first solo CD, is a selection of works which explore the piano’s vast colouristic possibilities in intriquing, often unfamiliar, and magical ways.
Eve has performed a number of North American premières of international composers, including the Spanish composer Maria de Alvear’s two-hour epic piano solo diptych De puro amor and En amor duro at Toronto’s Music Gallery, Scottish composer Judith Weir’s Piano Concerto with the CBC Vancouver Orchestra, and Songs of the East, a piece for soloist and two Disklaviers by the Japanese composer Masahiro Miwa, in Toronto (and again in Kobe, Japan).
Many Canadian composers have written works for Eve, including John Abram, Martin Arnold, Allison Cameron, José Evangelista (Canada Council commission), Rudolph Komorous, Michael Longton (CBC commission), Stephen Parkinson, Linda C. Smith (Canada Council commission), and Ann Southam (CBC commission).
The CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) has recorded and broadcast Eve’s performances of works by the Canadian composers Michael Longton and Ann Southam, the British composers Michael Finnissy and Judith Weir, and the American composer Alvin Curran.
She has appeared as a soloist in the festivals Rencontres musique écrite/musique improvisée, Montréal; the Vancouver New Music Festival; the Sound Symposium, St. John’s, Newfoundland; Musicora, Paris; and the Kobe International Modern Music Festival, Japan.
Eve trained in standard repertoire at the Victoria Conservatory of Music with Anne Brayshaw and Winifred Scott Wood, the University of Victoria with Eva Solar-Kinderman, the Banff Centre of Fine Arts with György Sebök, the Hochschule der Künste in West Berlin with Georg Sava (German Academic Exchange Scholarship), the Royal Academy of Music in London, England, with Hamish Milne (Commonwealth Scholarship), and in Toronto where she completed her M.Mus. at the University of Toronto with Patricia Parr.
available from the CMC Boutique (EVE 0104) and CDemusic