Mohamed Assani and John Oliver premiered their intercultural sitar concerto with The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.

Drawing on, as well as departing, from the conventions of Hindustani classical music (Northern India and Pakistan) and Western contemporary orchestral music, Assani and Oliver collaborate to create Pressed for Time – a sitar concerto. Pushing past the idea of ‘setting’ the sitar in either a traditional or avant-garde context, instead they merge the best of both, developing the raga in a non-linear way, creating unexpected changes and new ideas that transform the musical materials and form. This new synthetic work plays with the listener’s expectations. Thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Hari Sharma Foundation for funding.

The cross-cultural PEP (Piano and Erhu Project) performed the world premiere of Sorrow and Its Beauty by renowned U.K composer Michael Finnissy.

More than ten years ago, I made a frustratingly unsatisfactory first attempt at this piece. Thanks to Corey Hamm’s sensitive cajoling, I have made a new and definitive version, in which only a small part of the original survives. The Erhu music is derived from Joseph-Marie Amiot’s Divertissements Chinois (1779), courtesy of my friend Tom Irvine. Amiot’s well-intentioned transcriptions stumble into issues of ‘cultural appropriation’ and ‘globalisation’ (hence my title). The piece is dedicated to PEP. (Michael Finnissy)

The Victoria Symphony premiered Jared Miller’s Concerto Corto for violin and orchestra, featuring the brilliant Canadian violinist Müge Büyükçelen.

Ordinarily when I compose, I begin with a concept inspired by something extra-musical, whether it’s an image, memory, history, or current events. Contrarily, when I wrote Concerto corto, I was consumed with purely musical concerns. I began with the idea of reverberation and how this physical concept could be manifested in the relationship between the violin and orchestra – whether sounds were reverberating out of the solo violin part, echoing around it, or imitating each other. As I continued to explore though, my initial experiments with reverberation liberated me creatively and resulted in the eclectic compositional language that pervades this piece. (Jared Miller)

The premiere of Hildegard Westerkamp’s Klavierklang (for piano and stereo soundtrack) was beautifully brought to life by pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa during the ISCM2017 closing concert, A Kind of Magic: Music for Solo Piano.

Klavierklang is a sonic-musical journey into the complexities of piano playing. During the past few years, Pianist Rachel Iwaasa and I often reflected on the challenging and traumatic, but also inspiring experiences we have had with piano teachers, the roles our mothers’ ears played in our musical development, and how much the piano has been both a sanctuary for sonic explorations and soundmaking, as well as a site of trauma and discouragement. Ultimately, Klavierklang is a journey towards the piano playing we have always loved, into the magic of its sound.