An evening of solo piano music by Matthew Lee Knowles, Leo Svirsky, and others, exploring allusion, repetition, deconstruction, playfulness and the calm. Performed by Matthew Lee Knowles and Dominic Irving.
Watercolour by Paul Sandby
“Being upon the Castle Terrace at Windsor, in the company of my friends… we observed a very extraordinary meteor in the sky, such as none of us remembered to have seen before… This ball, at the beginning, appeared of a faint bluish light… but it gradually increased its light, and soon began to move, at first ascending above the horizon in an oblique direction towards the east… its light was prodigious. Every object appeared very distinct; the whole face of the country in that beautiful prospect before the terrace being instantly illuminated.”
The natural philosopher Tiberius Cavallo published his recollections of the transit of a meteor on the evening of the 18th August 1783. A little later it was depicted in a watercolour by the map-maker Paul Sandby.
The watercolour captures three suspended moments in the course of the company’s observation. The meteor transit, with all its clarity, appears like a collective dreaming – triggering different interpretations as to its source and its direction, its specific features, and the meaning it conveys. A nearly semi-imagined phenomenon interrupts the pace of the evening, becoming a long-lasting series of recollections, studies and inspirations.
Doors open at 7pm. The concert begins at 7:30pm.
Curated by Sasha Elina.
PROGRAMME
Matthew Lee Knowles:
Music from the FOR series and other pieces
Leo Svirsky:
Garden (trad. arr. Yanka Dyagileva) (2019-2022)
Blue Dream Excerpt for Jack Callahan (2017-2022)
COMPOSERS & PERFORMERS
Matthew Lee Knowles is a composer, poet, performer and teacher based in London. In his own words, his interests include sequence, repetition, allusion, exact and crippled symmetry, theme and variation, duration, freedom, subtle and blasé theatre, silence, extreme editing, superimposition, impossibility, endurance, pointlessness, ridiculousness, mathematics, mesostics, codes, authority, the everyday, newspapers, cosmology, physics and generally just being an experimentalist. Since 2007, Matthew has engineered small and large-scale happenings, the locations including a cemetery, a field, a library, a street and a concert hall stage. At the start of 2021 he finished a four year project, turning a novel into music resulting in a final work lasting 26 hours – For Clive Barker – making it the longest single-movement non-repeating piano composition ever written. In September 2021, the pianist Kate Ledger and Matthew released an album of Matthew’s piano music, called FOR.
Leo Svirsky is a Russian-American pianist and composer, born in 1988 and currently based in the Hague, Netherlands. His music explores the instability of listening and the disorientation of memory and affect while remaining grounded in history and symbol, song and story. His study of piano with the Russian pedagogue Irena Orlov led to an interest in Soviet and post-Soviet “unofficial” culture, “forgotten” pieces from the ‘20s, and avant-garde music of the ‘70s and ‘80s. In 2009, Leo moved to the Netherlands to study with the late Dutch pianist Rian de Waal at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague. He holds MA degrees in both Composition and Piano Performance from this institution. Leo has been collaborating with the musical community associated with Edition Wandelweiser. His most recent album River Without Banks was released on Unseen Worlds in 2019. Its title is taken from a chapter in Tree of Music – a philosophical work by his piano teacher’s husband, the preeminent Soviet musicologist Genrikh Orlov.
Dominic Irving is a pianist and composer based in London. He studied at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London, graduating in 2009. Two years later, he completed an MA in Composition of Music for Film and Television at Bristol University. Dominic's composition prizes include the Simon May Trophy (2003), London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra Piece of the Year (2008), and the John Halford Prize (2009), among others. His music has been performed in the UK, including the Barbican Centre, BFI Southbank, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and others. It has also been broadcast on Classic FM and BBC Radio 3. In 2021, together with Matthew Lee Knowles and Sarah Parkin, Dominic recorded the piano part on Lee Knowles’ two song albums: This is a Warning and a Threat and Invisible Heart.