Concert: "Light and Perspective"

Two works on this concert program involve the transformation of soft sounds and silences. Katoka Suzuki’s In Praise of Shadows is performed on instruments of varying sizes and shapes that were created by the composer entirely out of paper. Amplification and electronic media create a perspective where the nearly inaudible rustling of paper becomes a rich and mesmerizing soundworld. In Marc Estibeiro’s Displaced Light, inspired by refugee crises in Europe in 1956 and 2016, there is a sense of pervasive struggle built into the work, as if sounds are unwilling to be drawn from the instruments. The flute opens the work from silence, gradually turning the subtle, distant sound of wind and breath into a present sound and then fading back into silence. These moments of stillness are accompanied often by single notes in the piano that are left to ring until they join an undercurrent of electronic sound that reacts to the live performance.