On 25 October Cédric Tiberghien premiered Lisa Illean’s Sonata in ten parts at Wigmore Hall. The 19-minute work was commissioned by Wigmore Hall and is the composer’s first for solo piano.
Illean was invited to create a work to sit alongside and speak to Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Each of its ten parts began as an improvisation on a pattern derived from a moment – often little more than a bar – in Beethoven’s set of 33 variations. Following the spirit of this form, Illean transformed the patterns while also drawing disparate starting points into a common nocturnal atmosphere. This mood is explored in movements of preternatural stillness and delicacy, while others feature darting, quicksilver figuration with a more animated character.
Each of the ten parts belongs to and illuminates the others; there are explicit recollections of material but also recurring sound images that are continuously renewed and reimagined - patterns often reaching or grasping, cascades like sudden vistas of light, and sonorities grounded in major and minor seconds. Occasionally direct allusions to the Beethoven surface like an iceberg, but mostly these partially dissolved, “coiling and uncoiling, altering, aqueous, lightening”, as Illean puts it.
Illean’s music returns to Wigmore Hall on 26 November with a performance of Cantor from Alice Rossi and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, conducted by Geoffrey Paterson, who repeat the work at Birmingham’s CBSO Centre the following day. Like Sonata in ten parts, the 15-minute piece for soprano and ensemble has a crepuscular mood, in its setting of Willa Cather’s April Twilights. The soprano line is embedded in a string quartet made up from violin, viola, cello, bass, joined by piano – played also with soft mallets and toothbrush – percussion, flute, and clarinet. She writes,
Breathing sounds and gestures permeate Cantor, and recurring flaring patterns evoke glowing shafts of light. Cantor superimposes cycles of lines, waves or impulses…musically, the texture is like a tableau upon which the voice carves its line...Bearing solitude gracefully is a recurring theme: in atmosphere, Cantor is by turns desolate and intimate.
Premiered in 2017 by Ensemble Offspring, Jessica Aszodi and Roland Peelman at Sydney’s Carriageworks, Cantor was named Instrumental Work of the Year at the 2018 Australian Art Music Awards.