Loops, Drones and Landscapes

Xenia Pestova returns to Café Oto with meditative and transformative works for piano and toy piano. Music by North American experimental music giants Alvin Curran, Alvin Lucier and Gayle Young is placed in context with works by radical and non-conformist UK-based composers Ed Bennett and Egidija Medeksaite.

Pestova will chart a journey through Alvin Lucier’s rarely-programmed classic “Music for Piano with Slow Sweep Pure Wave Oscillators”, which explores tunings and resonant spaces in a shifting landscape where nothing is what it seems. Alvin Curran’s “Inner Cities” 2 and 3 for piano and toy piano inhabit and move through intimate sonic narratives. Ed Bennett’s “Out of Nowhere” movement requires the pianist to strum and pluck the inside of instrument like a harp in an immersive drone soundscape. The evening will also feature two world premiere performances: “As Trees Grow” by Canadian experimental composer Gayle Young, a deeply contemplative work exploring natural durations of text meditated upon by the performer, and an uncompromising new work by Egidija Medeksaite, which will push the little toy piano to its limits.