DAME :
Grande Fête at Sala Rossa (4848 St-Laurent) December 15 8:30pm. FREE ADMISSION
Pre-release and unveiling the album covers!
Collection QB is coming out with two new albums in 2022, the result of a long collaboration between Quatuor Bozzini and composers Michael Oesterle and Tom Johnson. We can't wait to share them with you! Stay tuned for the official online release later this winter of Michael Oesterle: Quatuors and Tom Johnson: Combinations.
In the meantime, we will be playing excerpts from both albums live at the DAME Grande Fête at the Sala Rossa in Montreal on December 15, 2021. You will be the first to be able to purchase the albums *on site only*. Twelve titles from Ambiances magnétiques, Mikroclimat and Collection QB, are being celebrated that night with a whole community of artists. Come celebrate with us!
The cover illustration is a painting by the artist Christine Unger.
Michael Oesterle’s friendship and connection with the Quatuor Bozzini dates back nearly 25 years to the quartet’s very first commission. Ever since, Oesterle has been exploring the sound of the string quartet through a catalog that spans from 1998 to 2019. Brilliantly constructed, his music is playful, intimate, sentimental, and demanding.
Daydream Mechanics is inspired by the book Mécanique jongleuse by Québec poet Nicole Brossard and explores hypnotic figures, playing on the border between memory and perception. String Quartet No. 3 "Alan Turing" is a tribute to the English scientist and his free spirit whose creative potential we have irretrievably lost. Serious or playful, the colorful and evocative pieces of Three Pieces for String Quartet have as a common thread endangered animals. Finally, his most recent String Quartet No. 4, is a large-scale work with a calm and sprawling style. And as in all his music, the search for balance in the musical materials, which are geometric and expressive, is at the forefront. (Michael Oesterle : Les Quatuors. CQB 2229 – Release April 16
2022)
The cover illustration is by Marie-Pierre Morin.
Tom Johnson uses numbers as base material, turning formulas, combinations and other mathematic phenomena into music. And somehow, this music becomes poetry, sometimes like a haiku, sometimes like a sonnet, sometimes descriptive and clear, often enigmatic but always beautiful.
The album includes four works for string quartet: Combinations (2003), written for Quatuor Bozzini, Tilework (2003), a canon consisting of 12 notes that interlock like mosaic tiles, Four-note Chords (2009), a tribute to the theorist and musicologist Allen Forte, and Formulas (1994), based on
mathematical formulas and whose title is more than just a metaphor. (Tom Johnson: Combinations. CQB 2230– Release February 23 2022)
