Souvenance is the title of an upcoming album by pianist Jennifer King. The release of works for solo piano, including piano nocturnes, romances without words, and meditations, is a collection that begins in the Romantic era, stretches into the 20th century, and even to today.
The composers represented on the release are all women, including King herself in an arrangement of Joni Mitchell’s iconic song Blue. The album is meant to convey a personal and introspective experience of the music and its varying moods of hope, heartbreak, strength and vulnerability.
Souvenance will be released on April 25 on Wharf Records, with one single — Cécile Chaminade’s, Nocturne in B major, Op. 165 — available already here.
Jennifer King, Piano
Jennifer King is a performer, collaborator, adjudicator, coach and recording artist. She also hosts the Cecilia Concerts Sensory Accessible Series in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is equally at home performing as a soloist as she is as a chamber musician.
The Canadian-British musician earned a Bachelor of Music from Acadia University, a Master of Music in solo piano performance from McGill University, and then went on to receive postgraduate diplomas from the University of Reading (UK) and the Royal Academy of Music in London, UK.
Jennifer is a familiar face on the concert circuit in the Maritimes and across Canada. She has commissioned several original works from Canadian composers, and has also has co-written a musical play about women gaining the right to vote with mezzo-soprano Suzanne Campbell.
As a recording artist, her catalogue has been characterized by thoughtful curation of the works involved. Her debut recording, O Mistress Moon (2018), spans 200 years of nocturnes and other music inspired by the night by composers Chopin, Britten, Satie, Debussy, Barber, Poulenc, Schumann, Scriabin, Respighi, and JUNO award winning Derek Charke. She followed up in 2022 with O Mistress Moon: Canadian Edition, featuring all-Canadian composers, which won the ECMA for Classical Album of the Year for 2023.
Other albums include (among others), Doolittle: Minute Études “Excerpts” (Live), including excerpts from a series of piano pieces by composer Emily Doolittle, and Twilight Hour (2020), which features a collection of 12 short works inspired by fairy tales.
Jennifer King: The Interview
Careful curation and selection is very much part of the recording process for King.
“I think that’s something that’s always interested me — how music can be juxtaposed, and how it can cause a different reflection of that piece,” King says.
She recalls being an avid reader in high school. At one point, she read a huge anthology of poetry, and seeing the works together, and observing how her perception of the individual poems was influenced by what she’d read previously, left an impression.
It’s one way of working with a standard repertoire that includes hundreds of years worth of material, and literally thousands of pieces.
“If you’re always playing somebody else’s interpretations, it’s a way to leave your mark,” she notes. “It’s always been a lifelong interest.”
She counts herself lucky to have the opportunity to curate her own programs these days, including those for the Cecilia Concerts Sensory Accessible Series. “That’s a really strong drive in what I do.”
It’s a contrast to the approach of many artists, who will choose to focus on a single composer for an entire album.
“I don’t know if I can do that!” she laughs. Jennifer notes that she reads three books at once, for example. “I like to see how these things relate to each other.” Choosing pieces that move from one era to another, and revolve around a theme, can serve to reveal connections between the music and different periods of history.
As she points out, she began recording after she’d already established herself in a career, working at a university and performing as a collaborative pianist. “I didn’t start recording until I was in my late 40s,” she says.
While she was at Oxford, however, the seeds were planted by explorations in a wonderful music store, where she was introduced to many pieces of music.
“I just started collecting nocturnes.” That’s where O Mistress Moon came from. It felt like time for her to do something on her own, and her collection of nocturnes was calling. When she released the redux, O Mistress Moon – Canadian Edition, she says she “reluctantly” submitted it for an ECMA (East Coast Music Award).
Twilight Hour, with its fairy tale theme, arose from music she’d collected for performances that involved live painting and dance.
“I had this beautiful little collection of fairy tale pieces.”
Along with music she’d collected, her albums have included original commissioned works.
“I think the composers themselves like having this theme,” she notes. “That has helped in my curation. It becomes very personal, this curation.”
Souvenance
Souvenance came about partly because of happenstance. Jennifer happened to have some time for a project during the summer of 2024.
“We have a really good piano dealer here in Halifax,” she notes. It led to the purchase of a wonderful grand.
“Why am I going to rent a hall, and pay for a piano that I don’t really know what it will sound like?”
Together with multi JUNO Award winning producer/recording engineer John DS Adams, she set to work. Adams gave the thumb’s up to her idea of recording from her living room. The only sticking point was ambient noise.
“I went around to 18 neighbours,” she recalls. She asked if they could possibly not mow their lawns or do noisy yard work between certain specific hours of the day. As she reports, they were thrilled to comply.
“It was kind of a good community building exercise,” she laughs.
The pieces on the album include music, much of it seldom heard or recorded, by French composers Mel Bonis (1858 to 1937), and Cécile Chaminade (1857 to 1944), Russian-born Canadian composer Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté (1899 to 1974), and American Dana Suesse (1911 to 1987), along with Clara Wieck-Schumann’s Notturno in F Major, Op. 6 No. 2, and Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel’s Notturno in G Minor, H-U 337, and King’s own arrangement of Joni Mitchell’s Blue.
Finding and collecting the repertoire is an ongoing process. Jennifer had been introduced to Cécile Chaminade during her undergrad days, for example. Some of her work as a collaborative pianist led to further discoveries.
When it came to lesser known pieces like Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté’s Caprice II Nocturne “Gute Ruh”, E.96, a little more digging was required. King says she found one single recording of the work to use as a reference. It meant research to determine the composer’s original intentions.
“I really feel like it’s a new offering. I’m really proud of my interpretation of it.”
For her own compositional input for the album, she was looking for music, and an artist, that crossed genres. Joni Mitchell and her music fit that bill.
“I wanted some more Canadian content,” she adds. “I actually want to send this improvised version to Joni.” She likens it to the “recomposed” albums, which are inspired by a specific piece, but improvise around it.
“I improvise,” she says of her compositional process. It’s not something she often does in a public concert, but that may change. Her work with Mitchelll’s Blue has sparked a new direction.
“I put this nugget of this beautiful, stunning song on the album because it’s kind of where I want to go next.”
- Find links to pre-reserve, stream or buy Souvenance [HERE].
- If you’re on the East Coast, you can attend the Halifax album launch; details [HERE].
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