Friday, Nov. 25th marks a year since the death of composer Ann Southam.
Fortunately, composers, like most other creators, are full of gifts that keep on giving — as long as there is a willing interpreter and eager ears in the room.
Southam kept working right up to the end with two of her keenest interpreters: Toronto pianists Eve Egoyan and Christina Petrowska Quilico.
The first posthumous fruit of this collaborative work was Quilico’s Glass Houses Revisited. Coming shortly is Returnings, a new disc from Egoyan, which gets its release concert on Dec. 2 at the Glenn Gould Studio.
Here is what Egoyan has to say in a press release of this premiere recording — and premiere public performances:
“This recording marks a personal closure,” says Eve Egoyan. “Along with Simple Lines of Enquiry, it represents the complete works for solo piano that Ann wrote with me in mind. I cherish the memory of playing for her, listening together and discussing her music. The interpretative journey continues: each time I perform her music, Ann returns as radiant resonance, with us, forever.”
For more information on the concert, click here. The disc, which I have not yet listened to, is coming from the Canadian Music Centre, which will eventually list it here.
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To mark the anniversary of Southam’s passing, I thought I’d transfer over from my old blog what I wrote when I found out she had died:
There is no other new Canadian composition that has affected me as much as Pond Life, the suite Ann Southam wrote for pianist Christina Petrowska Quilico three years ago.
I found out last spring that Southam was not well, and intended to see if I could sit down and have a nice long chat with her — but I procrastinated, much to my regret, because her long career as a composer, which began in the early 1960s had, 30 years later, culminated in a simplicity of language and architecture that spoke eloquently of someone who had found the key to balance in life.
She experimented with electro-acoustic music and serialism, but found her real compositional voice in something no less intellectual, but easier for any listener to grasp. She also taught at the Royal Conservatory of Music for many years.
I’m sure that the many pieces she wrote for modern dance companies (especially Toronto Dance Theatre and Danny Grossman) were part of the process of literally grounding her imagination.
I found an interesting quote from a 2008 copy of Musicworks magazine, which contains an interview with pianist Eve Egoyan (another champion of Southam’s work). It speaks directly to the sense of lively engagement in the composer’s music:
“. . . there is a close connection between composing for or playing the piano and other forms of work done by hand, such as weaving, that reflect the nature of traditional women’s work – repetitive, life-sustaining, requiring time and patience. But through it all, runs a thread of questioning . . . .”
The more I see, hear and experience, the more I have realised that questioning is a state of being in the world that we often undervalue these days.
Musically, Southam’s questioning takes the form of ever-repeating musical motifs that, over time and small changes, coalesce into answers.
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Here is Quilico performing onf of the “Soundstill” sections from Pond Life:
http://www.youtube.com/user/GVTOP#p/u/19/czMRzQiiRZk
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